Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Self-Awareness Focused Contemporary Pharmacy Practice Course

Objectives: Foster personal and professional development through implementing a 1st-professional year course focused on increasing student self-awareness related to themselves, their chosen profession, and their future careers. Method: Eighty-nine students enrolled in a required 2-credit hour Contemporary Practice of Pharmacy I course during the Fall 2013 semester. Course content aligned closely with the CAPE 2013 Self-Awareness subdomain. Topics included, but were not limited to: effective learning strategies, achievement motivation, finance and time management, professional communication and etiquette, career exploration, and professional history and visioning. Formative and summative evaluations, e-portfolio entries, and submitted assessments and reflections were used to evaluate inaugural course outcomes. Results: Early course self-reflections and self-assessments revealed students particularly appreciated increasing their self-awareness related to strengths, learning strategies, and financial management. However, mid-semester formative evaluations revealed that 75% of students perceived little benefit from the class secondary to previous exposure to course topics. Purposeful activities were used to stress differences between topic exposure and reflection upon and integration of content into one’s self-schema. Summative course evaluations were subsequently positive (median 4 or 5 on 5-point Likert scale for all items), and e-portfolio submissions and course self-reflections indicated self-reported professional and personal growth in multiple domains. Implications: Students benefitted from multiple, purposeful, authentic opportunities to develop personal and professional self-awareness through participation in the course. However, incorporation of perceivably familiar personal and professional development topics in pharmacy curricula may be met with student reservation. Integration of self-awareness opportunities throughout the curriculum may foster student buy-in regarding perceivably familiar topics