| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 臨床藥學研究所 === 105 === Background:
Self-efficacy is crucial for students to be motivated and successfully strive for active learning. Students with high self-efficacy in professional competencies may not only reassure themselves to attain achievement, but their subjective assessments are also powerful evidence to evaluate effectiveness of teaching. The Bachelor of Science (B.S.) program in National Taiwan University School of Pharmacy has transited to 6-year Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D.) program recently. It is crucial to develop a scale to measure pharmacy students’ self-efficacy of professional competencies as an evidence for an evaluation of educational outcomes.
Objectives:
We aimed to develop a scale to measure pharmacy students’ self-efficacy of professional competencies and to evaluate the reliability and validity of the scale. Besides, we also aimed to explore the differences of students’ self-efficacy of 2 programs and years by a cross-sectional survey.
Methods:
The scale was developed based on literature review, interview of focus group, experts review and pretest with cognitive interview. We collected surveys from senior pharmacy students. We performed item analysis, stratified exploratory factor analysis, criterion-related validity and Cronbach’s alpha to validate the scale. Lastly, we compared the differences of self-efficacy between programs and years by Student’s t-test, Mann-Whitney U-test and Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance ranks.
Results:
Five constructs (interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism, pharmaceutical care, system based practice, practice based learning and improvement) and 119 items had been established based on literature review and experts’ opinions. The content validity index showed satisfying results (All I-CVIs higher than 0.83, S-CVI/Ave 0.98). A total of 81 students (94% response rate) responded the survey. After item analysis and stratified exploratory factor analysis, 53 items had been retained. The Cronbach’s alpha was 0.969 for the whole scale (All constructs higher than 0.9). For criterion-related validity, students group of superior academic performance showed significantly higher self-efficacy than students group of inferior academic performance in the constructs of professionalism, pharmaceutical care and the total score (p < 0.05).
In the cross-sectional survey, 6th year Pharm.D. students showed highest self-efficacy in all five constructs and the total score compared to the rest of students. Specifically, the former demonstrated significantly higher self-efficacy than 4th year Pharm.D. students in the constructs of professionalism, pharmaceutical care, system based practice, practice based learning and improvement (p < 0.05). In addition, 6th year Pharm.D. students also showed significantly higher self-efficacy than 4th year B.S. students in the construct of pharmaceutical care (p < 0.05).
Conclusions:
The newly developed scale demonstrated good reliability and validity. It may serve as a psychometrically sound tool for pharmacy educators and researchers to measure pharmacy students’ self-efficacy in professional competencies, and hence an evidence for educational outcomes evaluation.
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