Change in self-assessed comfort level of first-year pharmacy students as an alternative approach to measure teaching effectiveness and learning outcomes

Objective measures for assessing teaching effectiveness and learning outcomes in the pharmacy curriculum are needed for improving quality of instruction and faculty development. The purpose of this article is to introduce a new teaching assessment method that focuses on self-assessed change in student comfort with the topics taught rather than evaluation of the instructor and to evaluate its performance in comparison to conventional student evaluations of teaching (SET).

Six successive cohorts of first-year pharmacy students were surveyed regarding their comfort level at the beginning and end of a 10-week pharmacology course. The change in self-assessed comfort level (ΔSACL) was interpreted as the amount of learning that occurred. This indicator was compared to ratings of a statement from SET designed to obtain the same information.

An increasing ΔSACL suggests an increase in learning over time. Differences were observed between ΔSACL and corresponding results from SET, suggesting that there could be extrinsic factors influencing the results.

The use of ΔSACL could provide an alternative or complementary approach to assess teaching effectiveness that focuses less on the instructor and more on the actual student learning outcomes.