Abstract:

Pharmaceutical Scene Investigation (PSI) is a project that was carried out with the students of Pharmaceutical Chemistry II in the degree programme of Pharmacy at San Jorge University (USJ) during the academic year 2015-2016.

The main goal of this project was to improve collaborative work among students, and encourage them to drive their own learning by increasing their autonomy, creativity and responsibility. The activities were set in a fictitious Anglo-Saxon murder scene and given an attractive and scientifically challenging format to increase students’ motivation and involvement.

The project required that students used the scientific content they studied to unravel a crime case by participating in higher order thinking activities and discussions during class, taking on the role of teams of pharmaceutical detectives. A significant added value of the PSI project was the integration of English in the content subject in question, which is one of the goals San Jorge University has for enhancing its students’ academic development.

Finally, the assessment design of the activity focused on finding the optimal way to determine the impact of this new methodology of teamwork on the student. The main improvement of this approach consisted of assigning an individual mark to each student taking into account his effort and his individual contribution to the group in the context of a collaborative learning. First implementation in the academic year 2015-2016 was based on evaluation by competences through teacher, self and peer-assessment, using rubrics as evaluation tools.

Keywords:

Problem based learning, Role playing, Competency-based evaluation, Teacher, Self and Peer-assessment, Content and Language Integrated Learning.