SOAPing in Pharmacology: An innovative Tool to Foster Critical Thinking during Didactic Years in Pharmacy School
Authors: Rajagopalan Vanishree , Ellerby H Michael , Vo Erika 
Published: June 2021

During the didactic years of pharmacy education, it is imperative to provide students with tools to enhance their critical thinking skills that involve adequate use of analysis, reflection, open mindedness, and evidence in solving a problem at hand. This kind of training is anticipated to equip the students with the skills to tackle constantly evolving advances in pharmacy, such as availability of new medications as well as changes in delivery of patient care. For decades, such training has been introduced early in the didactic years in Clinical Science courses especially while instructing students to analyze patient cases and write up SOAP (subjective, objective, assessment, plan) notes. Such training has indisputably helped students to transition to their experiential rotations. Our aim was to design and implement a similar critical thinking tool in Basic Science courses, such as pharmacology, thus enabling pharmacy students to broaden their application of critical thinking skills during their didactic training. Towards this end, we have developed an Observational Screening Student Project (OSSP) for the second‐year pharmacy students based on the results of a battery of preclinical tests (termed Hippocratic Screening) originally administered on rats by Malone and colleagues in 1983 to test ethnopharmaceuticals. These tests form a subset of safety pharmacological studies required by the FDA in order to evaluate the non‐clinical safety profiles of pharmaceuticals and their effects on physiological functions.

In the OSSP, students are given a worksheet with data containing CNS, respiratory, and autonomic pharmacologic responses in a rat induced by an intraperitoneal injection of a drug covered in prior courses taken in pharmaceutical sciences. After analyzing the data, students are asked to determine the drug class that most likely produced the pharmacological profile depicted by the data in that worksheet. When analyzing the data to determine the drug class, students must consider the signs and symptoms that are present as well as those that are absent. The students are encouraged to use analysis, reflection, open mindedness, and evidence in solving their problem at hand, which gives them an opportunity to develop their critical thinking skills.

Survey results of the class demonstrated that over 70% felt that they were able to effectively review and analyze the rat's symptoms after administration of a drug as presented in the worksheet (80% response rate). A similar percentage of students indicated that they were able to keep an open mind and describe the process involved in assessing the data on the worksheet. However, only about 52% of students thought that they were able to develop follow‐up questions based on the evidence provided in the worksheet. Developing follow‐up questions is a higher order critical thinking process, which normally comes with more experience and training. Overall, more than 50% of the respondents felt that OSSP was a valuable educational tool that would better prepare them to progress into their experiential courses. In conclusion, OSSP can be regarded as a pre‐clinical subjective, objective, assessment, and plan (SOAP) tool to improve critical thinking skills that will aid students in analyzing a patient as a whole, working them up, assessing drug therapies, making necessary adjustments, and seeking appropriate literature as evidence to support their findings.

This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.