A flexible, group-based assessment strategy for Historically Black College and University pharmacy students

Historically Black College and University (HBCU) students often have diverse educational backgrounds and learning needs. We describe the implementation of a group-based assessment (GBA) strategy within a pharmacotherapy course at a HBCU.

Ninety second-year pharmacy students participated in the study, completing eight formative GBAs, two summative exams, and a demographic questionnaire. In this study, GBAs were administered as post-assessments after each topic and prior to an exam. Our pilot study sought to describe mean GBA scores in relation to summative exam performance. Data analysis employed descriptive statistics.

The majority of students were female (61%), identified as either African American (37.8%) or East Asian (35.5%) descent, and claimed English as a second language. The preliminary analysis described student performance levels on Exam 1 and Exam 2 and means of each corresponding GBA. There was a general upward trend in GBA mean scores across the majority of exam performance levels with the exception of GBA 6. GBAs 1 through 4 had the lowest mean scores across all Exam 1 performance levels.

This pilot study described a flexible group-based assessment format that encouraged student-paced learning among HBCU students. Frequent GBA may act as an early-warning system for these students and can engage students earlier in the course to improve academic performance on major exams. Future studies with a larger number of subjects are needed to validate the use of this GBA strategy in similar settings.