(88) Infectious Disease-related Knowledge Retention in Third Year Pharmacy Students

Objective : To determine the extent to which pharmacy students retain knowledge about infectious disease-related topics to the end of the didactic curriculum.

Methods: Students enrolled in an advanced infectious disease (ID) elective at the end of the third professional year participated in a self-assessment on the first day of class. This self-assessment consisted of 50 questions identical to the questions the students had been tested on in prior courses. Two ID faculty members identified the most important foundational ID knowledge exam questions to use on the self-assessment. Students were also asked to rank their confidence in their ID-related knowledge before and after the self-assessment. The students’ scores on the self-assessment were compared to their performance on the same questions when given earlier in the curriculum. Performance was also broken down by type of question (recall versus interpretation/application).

Results: Overall, students answered 66% of questions correctly on the self-assessment. Students were overall not confident in their ID knowledge either before or after the self-assessment, although numerically fewer students were “not confident at all” after compared to before. 40.5% were recall questions, and 76% of these questions were answered correctly, whereas 69% of interpretation/application questions were correctly answered.

Conclusions: Pharmacy students enrolled in an ID elective retained about 66% of foundational ID knowledge throughout their didactic learning experience. Students remained unconfident in their ID knowledge when utilizing assessments with more interpretation/application questions.