Objective evaluation of clinical pharmacy lectures and experience in a master program using visual analog scale method

We conducted an investigation to determine whether the visual analogue scale (VAS) method could be utilized in evaluating the lectures and pharmacy experience of the Division of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Kanazawa University. Graduate students who had finished the 1-year pharmacy experience at the Kanazawa University Hospital were asked to make a self-evaluation of the understanding/attainment of lectures and experience in the course. Since the experience was carried out as a one-student-to-one-pharmacist system, the preceptors (pharmacists) were also asked to evaluate their corresponding students. When evaluating the necessity of the lectures, students tended to feel that the medical science- or pharmacotherapy-related subjects were important and those of social sciences were less important. These results suggest the need to review the contents of the lectures to enhance the interests of the students in the latter. By comparing the extent of understanding of each lecture before and after pharmacy experience, it was found that students had a better understanding of the lectures through their experience. In most results from the answers in pharmacy experience, students also scored themselves higher than their preceptors. Therefore comparisons of evaluation may provide more objective results in pharmacy experience. It was demonstrated that utilization of the VAS method and comparing the data are very useful in evaluating not only students' understanding/attainment but also the importance and usefulness of lectures and pharmacy experience in an objective way.