Documenting outcomes in student professional abilities through a case-based, student-centered pharmacotherapeutics course sequence

Assessments of the impact that new teaching strategies have on pharmacy stu dents' professional practice abilities are limited. This study compared an active learning, case-based, student-centered teaching approach (class of 1 998) to a lecture-based approach (class of 1997) for a therapeutic course s equence. An assigned case write-up on clerkship provided a course-removed a bility assessment. A primary-trait scoring rubric was developed and used by clinicians and non-clinicians to score 120 random sampled, blinded cases. A significant improvement in overall score, organization and persuasiveness traits was found for cases written by students in the intervention group. Trends to improvement were seen among this group in readability, tone and c linical accuracy. Student performance on a professional practice-based task improved following a format change in a therapeutics course sequence.