Evaluation by Students and Preceptors of Pharmacy Experience and Lectures in a Master Program Using Visual Analog Scale Method

We conducted a prospective investigation using the visual analog scale (VAS) method to evaluate the pharmacy experience and lectures of the Division of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Kanazawa University. The students were instructed to evaluate their understanding and attainment of the pharmacy experience and lectures. The preceptors then evaluated the students in their charge based on their understanding and attainment of the pharmacy experience. Comparisons before and after the pharmacy experience and for each student-preceptor pair were performed with the aim of solving problems encountered, if any, for improvement. For most of the cases, scores of, self-evaluation by the students for after the pharmacy experience were higher than those for before, indicating that the pharmacy practice had been effective. The student-preceptor comparison showed that the students gave themselves higher scores for understanding and the preceptors gave their students higher scores for skills. This shows that the students felt that they had gained much knowledge of pharmacy but thought that they needed further training to improve their practical skills. In the self-evaluations after the course of lectures but prior to the pharmacy practice, the overall degree of understanding was 60%, however, this decreased after the pharmacy experience. Thus, the students were not able to retain the knowledge gained during the lectures until the end of the pharmacy experience, suggesting a need to review the content of the lectures and to rearrange schedules.