Emotional engagement and perceived salience in pharmacy communication classes: A descriptive study of experiential...

Emotional engagement is key to learning, yet empirical evidence on how specific activities and emotions remain salient over time is limited. The objective of this study was to descriptively examine the relationship between emotional experiences reported immediately after instruction and learning activities that remained subjectively salient one week later.

This descriptive observational study with exploratory analyses used anonymous post-class and one-week follow-up surveys from two communication-skills classes of second-year pharmacy students. Students selected six predefined emotions related to achievement and cognitive disequilibrium. They also provided free-text descriptions of the most memorable learning activity at each time point. Exploratory chi-square analyses were used as descriptive indicators to examine patterns of emotion label distributions, similarities in emotion label distributions between Day 0 and Day 7, and activity-specific emotional profiles.

Response rates ranged from 93.9% to 100.0% across sessions. Across both sessions, positive emotions were predominant. The emotional distribution observed on Day 0 showed similar tendencies one week later. Role-play (RP) was the most frequently reported salient activity. Values clarification showed a surprise-dominant profile, while RP was empathy-dominant in one session and showed a balanced emotional distribution in the other.

Emotionally engaging experiential and interactive components remained salient one week later. These findings suggest that examining emotionally salient learning experiences may help inform instructional design and reflective educational practices in pharmacy education.