Abstract:

An action of Pharmaceutical Technology Teaching Innovation Team carried out in a subject of 1st year of Pharmacy degree of the University of Barcelona is presented, within the R&D project (PID2019-104285GB-100) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation.

The objectives were first to engage the students in an active learning method and secondly to assess the improvement of self-regulation of learning through a process of feedback and peer assessment. It has been intended that students play a leading role in developing various basic skills both for the Degree and for their future working life such as learning capacity, teamwork, communicative, creative, critical and self-critical abilities.

348 students of the subject of Introduction to Galenic Pharmacy (academic year 2020-21) were involved, who chose to carry out the continuous assessment. They were distributed in 3 groups in the morning (M1, M2, M3) and 3 in the afternoon (T1, T2 and T3), with M2 and T2 being the pilot groups (119 students). Within each group, working subgroups were formed to deal with the content of 2 theoretical topics of the program in the form of 13 knowledge pills in video format. These were viewed in class to receive the teacher’s comments. In the case of the pilot groups, a peer-to-peer feedback and evaluation process was also designed so that each subgroup could give and receive constructive criticism and thus enrich their learning and translate it into a reflective report.

To do this, an evaluation template was created with a series of items to be evaluated grouped into 4 quality criteria:
1) degree of elaboration and technical quality of the video (15% of the score),
2) capture of interest and structuring of information (15%),
3) academic style (15%) and
4) content (55%).

For each criterion, the students had to highlight the positive points, indicate the aspects to be improved, corrected or added. In this way, they provided constructive written feedback and also an overall assessment of the product created. The rating scale was 6 levels (A to F), where A corresponds to the level of excellence therefore a directly publishable product and F the level of extreme deficiency, unacceptable. Level D corresponds to the intermediate level.

Finally, each team of students had the opportunity to make a 2nd version of the video, which was the one the teacher finally evaluated. At the end of the task, a survey was conducted to determine the degree of satisfaction with the method followed.

The initiative was very well received: the subgroups were formed in 2-3 days and there were almost no incidents in the different phases of the task managed in Virtual Campus (Moodle platform). The 24 videos created by the pilot groups were evaluated among peers and also by the teachers using the same assessment tool. This could be validated as there was a good agreement between scores. The students indicated the aspects to improve in several of the quality criteria, particularly, the contents. With the 2nd version of better quality, everyone improved their grade. No significant differences were observed between the ratings of the pilot groups and the control groups, since both populations received quality feedback verbally from the teacher. While both populations were satisfied with their learning-assessment process, more than 85% of the control students thought that receiving feedback from peers and evaluating their work would be very positive for their learning.

Keywords:

Peer assessment, regulatory feedback, research project.