(294) Practice Makes Perfect: Web-based Software Automates Student Calculations Practice and Reduces Faculty Workload

Objective : Mastery of pharmaceutical calculations is required for obtaining a doctorate of pharmacy, passing the NAPLEX (North American Pharmacist Licensure Exam), and ensuring the pharmacist is an effective component of the healthcare team. Unfortunately, students struggle to comprehend pharmaceutical calculations, but this is improved by practice and repetition of problem sets. In addition, manual creation and grading of calculation problems is time consuming for faculty. To address this, we designed a unique web-based platform to generate unlimited low-stakes practice problems with immediate feedback to the students. This platform allows the student to “practice until perfect”, gives faculty full control of content design, and access to student progress data reports.

Methods: This unique web-based application is written in Visual Basic. Net programming language using ASP.net for the user interfaces and Microsoft SQL Server database for storage. It is hosted using Internet Information Services and allows access to any faculty or students in the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center system. Authors created a list of requirements for software design which engineers implemented.

Results: The unique web-based calculations software provided students unlimited opportunities for practice with immediate grading feedback, which created self-paced learning. It also reduced faculty workload by automating the creation of unlimited practice and graded problem sets, providing immediate grading to students with optional instructional feedback, and data to monitor student success.

Conclusions: This software increased student practice and success while reducing faculty workload in calculations courses. This tool can enhance the learning and retention of calculation-intensive materials which are a critical component of NAPLEX competencies.