Team-based Learning (TBL) in the Interdisciplinary Lecture

Abstract

  We conducted team-based learning (TBL) with interdisciplinary lectures as a part of “Introduction to Pharmacy”, divided among the pharmacy department's six pharmacist education curricula in the first semester. The interdisciplinary lecture is led by seven lecturers, each specializing in one area: cell biology, biochemistry, chemistry, public health pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, and clinical science. This lecture's purpose is to demonstrate to the students that all field subjects relate to each other and they must learn the basic science subjects to understand pharmaceutical sciences. The TBL contents have two themes, “cancer” and “aspirin”, each of which had two lectures, each 90 minutes long and were conducted using TBL as expansive learning. On receiving knowledge of a wide range of fields in one lecture, a small number of students indicated that they were unable to understand the contents very well. However, in the questionnaire about TBL, many students reported “I have understood” and “I have enjoyed studying” using TBL, especially group readiness assessment test (GRAT). By incorporating TBL, they reported “increasing eagerness to learn pharmacy”. Overall, students seem to have accepted TBL favorably, but they still find peer review difficult. We believe that their discomfort with peer review results from their unfamiliarity in evaluating others, and the time before the evaluation is short because TBL is conducted only twice.