Abstract:

In the last decades active learning has been increasingly applied at schools of pharmacy around the world on base on the importance of critical thinking and problem-solving skills for pharmacists. However, problem/project based learning has been typically restricted to clinical pharmacy teaching, and only a few approaches have been made in Instrumental Techniques apart from some isolated miniprojects within general courses of General Chemistry or Analytical Chemistry.

On the other hand, one of the main learning goals of instrumental analyses subjects in pharmacy is that student is able to discriminate among a wide range a instrumental techniques the most adequate for characterization, structural determination and/or quantification for specific samples and applications. In addition, general experimental competences are expected to be covered, as well as teamwork and autonomous-working skills.

Taking all above into account, it is presented a project-based learning (PBL) approach for undergraduate students in the second course of Pharmacy Bachelor degree at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in which the starting point is an open-ended question which implies an experimental procedure that can be carried out by a wide range of instrumental techniques. Students must act giving response to a particular problem, analyze the applicability of available instrumental techniques and construct his own experimental procedure for the elected technique, making hypotheses, designing lab experiments, obtaining coherent results, analysing obtained data and describing results to an audience. This project is developed in parallel with the study of the theoretical fundaments of the main instrumental techniques in Physical Chemistry and it is intended to be performed within a single semester along 15 weeks of lecture sessions and 1 week of laboratory sessions.

Keywords:

Instrumental techniques, pharmacy undergraduate students, project-based learning, laboratory project.