(379) Utilizing PharmD Teaching Assistants to Support Content Integration

Objective : To explore opportunities for integration among disciplines and identify potential areas of student confusion, three PharmD students in their third professional year (P3) reviewed course material as teaching assistants (TAs) alongside enrolled second year (P2) professional students.

Methods: All lectures in the Integrated Pharmacotherapy 1 (IP 1) course at The Ohio State University across pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, therapeutics, and pharmaceutics for each module (e. hypertension, genitourinary disorders, etc) were reviewed to identify any perceived or actual variations of similar information across disciplines that could be points of confusion for P2 students. Once reviewed, P3 students provided their notes to course faculty and communicated directly with P2 students about study strategies.

Results: TAs identified areas of variation such as different names for the same class of drugs, different diagrams or figures depicting the same mechanism of action of a drug, and varying degrees of emphasis around specific drug classes. After being identified by TAs, these points were clarified by course faculty to help alleviate any potential student confusion. In addition to clarification of content for P2 students, P3 TAs were able to review course content and practice communicating with students in a peer to peer layered learning model.

Conclusions: Different disciplines within a single module often had variations in content presentation that could have resulted in confusion amongst students, but was clarified through integration of information and peer to peer learning.