Just-In-Time Active Learning Instructional Pedagogy for PharmD Integrated Immunology Course

Abstract

Abstract Just-In-Time Teaching (JiTT) is an active learning pedagogy that has been successfully adopted by various disciplines. Our previous studies showed that JiTT presents value to a pharmacy curriculum. The current study implemented JiTT as an active-learning tool for an Integrated Immunology course offered during the first year of a PharmD program. At the end of the course, 38 students provided feedback on a survey that asked for their degree of agreement to various statements about JiTT usage in the course: 18 items were phrased positively (e.g., “Overall, JiTT questions are beneficial to me”), and 4 items were phrased negatively (e.g., “JiTT made the course more difficult”). These statements were rated on a scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The aggregate raw score for the 4 negatively-phrased items (M = 2.20, SD = 0.80) suggests that, overall, students typically disagreed with negatively-phrased statements about JiTT. After the negatively-phrased items were reverse-coded, all items were aggregated into a single measure (Cronbach’s alpha = .95) such that higher scores indicate positive overall perceptions of JiTT. This overall mean score for the survey indicates that students strongly perceive JiTT as beneficial (M = 4.00, SD = 0.84). Our results suggest that students in a pharmacy program perceive JiTT to be beneficial and valuable.