Health professions schools in the United States and internationally have engaged in curricular changes to better prepare students for the future of health care. However, designing or selecting evidence-based teaching activities can be a challenge. Research suggests the Cognitive Apprenticeship theory is an effective framework for the health…

Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) and Work Based Assessments (WBAs) are the mainstays of assessing clinical competency in health professions' education. Underpinned by the extrapolation inference in Kane's Validity Framework, the purpose of this study is to determine whether OSCEs translate to real life performance by comparing…

Recent research shows the importance to teach students the self-regulated use of effective learning strategies at university. However, the effects of such training programs on students' metacognitive knowledge, use of learning strategies, and academic performance in the longer term are unknown. In the present study, all first-year pharmacology…

This study investigates pharmacy students' reasoning while solving a case task concerning an acute patient counselling situation in a pharmacy. Participants' (N = 34) reasoning processes were investigated with written tasks utilizing eye-tracking in combination with verbal protocols. The case was presented in three pages, each page being followed…

The combination of measuring performance and giving feedback creates tension between formative and summative purposes of progress evaluations and can be challenging for supervisors. There are conflicting perspectives and evidence on the effects supervisor-trainee relationships have on assessing performance. The aim of this study was to learn how…

"Advances in Health Sciences Education" ("AHSE") has been at the forefront of the cognitive wave in health professions education for the past 25 years. One example is research on productive failure, a teaching strategy that asks learners to attempt to generate solutions to difficult problems before receiving instruction. This…

Productive failure is an instructional approach that requires learners to struggle as they attempt to generate solutions to problems before, rather than after, receiving direct instruction on a targeted concept. Studies demonstrate that productive failure prepares students for later learning of new, related knowledge. Our study explored the…

Communication skills in pharmacy education and practice are increasingly regarded as a crucial component. However, thus far, estimating of the overall communication skills training (CST) effects in a variety of outcomes is lacking. The aim of this study was to synthesize the effects of CST in pharmacy education by performing a meta-analysis of CST…

Information is generally more memorable after it is studied and tested than when it is only studied. One must be cautious to use this phenomenon strategically, however, due to uncertainty about whether testing improves memorability for only tested material, facilitates learning of related non-tested content, or inhibits memory of non-tested…

Non-local ethnicity or nationality and lower English proficiency have been linked with poor performance in health professional education. This study sought to compare the relative contributions of ethnicity and English proficiency, and to do so in a context where students had not been selected via interviews or some other proxy for language…

Demand for e-learning courses has risen dramatically placing pressure on institutions to offer more online courses. Third party vendors now offer courses that can be embedded directly into learning management systems. When transitioning from in-class to e-learning formats, instructors must decide whether to use commercially available courses or…

Despite their common history, there are many cultural, attitudinal and practical differences between the professions of medicine and pharmacy that ultimately influence patient care and health outcomes. While poor communication between doctors and pharmacists is a major cause of medical errors, it is clear that effective, deliberate…

Practice based interprofessional education opportunities are proposed as a mechanism for health professionals to learn teamwork skills and gain an understanding of the roles of others. Primary care is an area of practice that offers a promising option for interprofessional student learning. In this study, we investigated what and how students from…

Ensuring the competence of healthcare professionals' is core to undergraduate and post-graduate education. Undergraduate pharmacy students and pre-registration graduates are required to demonstrate competence at dispensing and accuracy checking medicines. However, competence differs from understanding. This study determined the competence and…

Depression in pregnancy or antenatal depression (AD) occurs in approximately one in five women, with potentially deleterious effects to the mother and fetus. People are encouraged to get treatment for depression; however, pregnant women can experience stigma when they reach out for help with depression. Research indicates that healthcare…