We are excited to share the news that our team has recently published the first paper within the FREMFARM project! The paper, titled "Introducing Debate as a Pedagogical Tool in Pharmacy Education," was published in the Nordic Journal for STEM Education, and explores the implementation of debate as a way to improve communication skills among pharmacy students.
Debate is an effective pedagogical tool that can increase student engagement, promote critical thinking, argumentative capacity, communication skills, and teamworking skills.
At the Centre for Pharmacy, we have always been passionate about finding new and innovative ways to engage my students and enhance their learning experience. This is why we are particularly proud of the work we have done in this project, which focuses on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in pharmacy education
About the paper
In this study, we used qualitative methods to explore students’ perception of implementing the debate activity in the Clinical Pharmacy course. We found that students showed a high level of enthusiasm and interest in the new learning activity, and that the debate helped them structure their thinking and simplify their language when communicating complex concepts. Additionally, students reported that preparing for the debate helped them organize their thoughts, gather information from prior taught courses, and draw connections to additional fields to prepare their arguments.
Our findings suggest that debate is an effective pedagogical tool that can increase student engagement, promote critical thinking, argumentative capacity, communication skills, and teamwork skills. However, we also noted that some students found the effort used to prepare for the debate activity too large in relation to the gains.
By sharing our findings and experiences, we hope to encourage others to consider debate as a pedagogical tool, and to contribute to the ongoing conversation on SoTL in pharmacy education