Tracking the Development of Student Self-Efficacy to Perform Clinical Pharmacy Tasks

Purpose: Managing patient care requires self-confidence. We developed a survey to assess self-efficacy to perform common clinical pharmacy tasks and tracked student responses over time.

Methods: The University of Maryland School of Pharmacy established sixteen terminal performance outcome (TPO) statements describing specific abilities all graduates should possess. Several TPOs focus on optimizing drug therapy in individuals and populations. A survey tool describing three case scenarios in community, hospital, and managed care settings was administered to students at school entry (baseline) and annually in the Spring semester (P1, P2, P3). Each scenario included key tasks, anchored to TPOs, that must be performed to address the patient problems in each case. Students are asked to envision themselves in each case scenario and rate their current ability/confidence to perform the tasks in the context of the scenario using an anchored likert-scale. Changes in self-confidence over time and comparisons between tasks and practice settings were analyzed.

Results: At baseline, most students indicated they could not perform the key tasks in any scenario "without substantial supervision" (ranging from 54 to 98% depending on task and scenario). As students progressed through the curriculum, the percentage who indicated they could perform these tasks without assistance significantly increased (range: 0 to 12% P1; 1 to 26% P2; 7 to 42% P3, p<0.001). Likewise, mean scores increased for each task (p<0.01). There were similar increases in self-efficacy in all practice settings. Student self-efficacy was highest for technology and information retrieval tasks and lowest for drug selection and therapy modification tasks.

Conclusions: Students in our curriculum demonstrated substantial and incremental improvement in their self-efficacy to perform key clinical pharmacy tasks over time. Tracking (individual and cohort) changes in self-efficacy may provide educators valuable insights regarding student progression toward curricular outcomes and may be a useful adjunct to other assessment methods.