Educational effect of practical training on students' robust acquisition and reconstruction of expertise on pharmaceutical sciences they had learned before practical training

Long-term practical training in the 6-year course of pharmaceutical education is a program for students after acquiring basic knowledge on pharmaceutical sciences and preclinical training. However, it remains unproved whether practical training affects students' robust acquisition and reconstruction of pharmaceutical expertise which they had learned before starting practical training. To address this issue, we administered survey questionnaires to 5th-year students (n=149) of Keio University in 2016 both before and after practical training. From the viewpoint of self-efficacy, psychological approach was applied to evaluate respondents' psychological state "to do well" on a 7-point Likert scale (1=disagree, 4=neither, 7=agree) for specific subjects C1-C18 (18 core units of pharmaceutical expertise in the current Model Core Curriculum for Pharmaceutical Education), mainly including basic pharmaceutical sciences, public health, clinical pharmacology and pharmacotherapy. C1-C18 total score values, which reflect the strength of certainty to acquire expertise, were significantly higher after the first term of practical training compared to before training, regardless of the pharmacy and the hospital (p<0.001), but not after the second term. Specific factors associated with increased score values for "to do well" were not extracted from other questionnaire answers concerning students' mentors or their self-learning during practical training. These results demonstrated that practical training at least partly reinforced students' feeling of "to do well", contributing to their robust acquisition and reconstruction of pharmaceutical expertise. Giving students recognition individually of their learning process themselves encourages more effective practical training toward their development of resources as a pharmacist.