Threshold concepts in the discipline of pharmacology - a preliminary qualitative study of students’ reflective essays
Methods: 21 students enrolled in the pharmacology component of a four years’ undergraduate optometry program were recruited for this study. They were provided with prompts and guidelines to write reflective essays related to their learning e teaching experience of pharmacological concepts and constructs in preparation for clinical practice.
Results: The reflective qualitative accounts were thematically analysed using a recent version of NVivo©. The themes were crossreferenced against two main criteria of threshold concept framework which included transformation and troublesomeness. The key characteristics that eventuated was transformation - in that students felt they had transformed into students who could learn and master.
Discussion: This study observed that learning process, when accompanied by challenges such as difficulty in understanding ‘foreign’ concepts and overwhelming content, motivated the students to adopt various strategies that not only aided their understanding of the subject but also transformed them as learners. The key attribute of threshold concept framework that thematically emerged through this study included transformation; in that students felt they had transformed into persons who could learn (and master) pharmacology alongside ‘creative’ teaching methods and ‘working out’ individual coping strategies.
History
Publication title
Health Professions EducationVolume
6Pagination
256-263ISSN
2452-3011Department/School
School of NursingPublisher
Elsevier BVPlace of publication
NetherlandsRights statement
Copyright 2020 King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Repository Status
- Open