Team-Based Learning Applied to a Medicinal Chemistry Course

Abstract

itly stated what factual material needed to be learned prior to the class session. This course met for a 2-hour session, once a week. At the beginning of each session, the students took a 10-question quiz that tested the recall and understanding of the factual information in the reading assignment. The weekly quiz motivated each student to come prepared. At the end of the quiz, the students handed in their individual quizzes and assembled in teams of 5–6 students formed on the first day of class who remained together throughout the course. Each team then took the same quiz, forcing the students to spend time discussing any facts or concepts that may not have been completely clear to all members of the team. Team answers were recorded and posted on an Instant Feedback-Assessment Technique (IF-AT), a scratch-off card for which the correct answer has a star underneath. The students received immediate feedback – the star was an instant reward. If the first answer chosen was incorrect, the students had then to discuss why that answer was wrong, and what the correct answer was. Time and effort were directed to the facts and concepts for which the students needed further clarification based on their incorrect responses. Points were awarded on a 5-3-2-1-0 basis, depending on how many attempts were needed to find the correct answer. The team score also counted toward each individual’s grade. When the individual and team quizzes were completed, there was a 5-min break. During this time, the teams could appeal any question they felt might have had an alternate answer. The textbook and credible online resources could be used. This method forced the students Team-based learning (TBL) is a teaching technique that was developed in the late 1970s by Larry Michaelsen in the Business School of the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Okla., USA [1, 2] . Recently, TBL has been applied to courses in the pharmacy curricula [3, 4] . Here I describe my experience using TBL methodology in a medicinal chemistry course I recently taught. Medicinal chemistry encompasses a number of important concepts related to the chemical structure of drug molecules, including pK a and pH behavior, solubility, stability, absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and structure-activity relationships. Traditionally, it has been taught as a lecture. In a lecture format, it is easy for students to regard the subject matter as a list of facts to be memorized. However, according to Bloom’s taxonomy of learning [5] , remembering facts is the most fundamental level of learning; understanding, applying, analyzing, and evaluating are successively higher levels of learning. Using the lecture methodology, it is challenging to go beyond remembering and understanding, the first levels of Bloom’s taxonomy of learning. In TBL, the goal is to encourage students to remember and understand before coming to class and then during the class session to analyze and apply the concepts presented using teams. The first step in TBL is to provide students with highly focused reading assignments. For this medicinal chemistry course, the readings came primarily from Foye’s Principles of Medicinal Chemistry , occasionally supplemented with primary literature. In a few instances, a 5to 10-min ‘minilecture’ was recorded and posted, the only lectures in the course. Each reading assignment explicReceived: August 1, 2012 Accepted: August 16, 2012 Published online: September 20, 2012