Case processing in supporting the development of expertise in pharmacy - an eye movement study

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to utilize process-level analyses to investigate pharmacy students’ reasoning during solving a written case task that handled acute patient counseling situation in the pharmacy. Participants’ (N = 34) problem-solving processes were investigated using the eye-tracking method together with written tasks and 2nd (n = 16) and 3rd (n = 18) –year students’ processes were compared. The text included semantically different level sentences: task-relevant sentences including essential information for the solution and task-redundant sentences that contained irrelevant or misleading information. The results showed that students differed in their performance and only four 2nd year students solved the case correctly, whereas almost all of the graduating students were successful. Further, most of those students, who ended up with a correct solution had presented a correct working hypothesis already after reading the first text page. Generally, the average total reading times did not differ between the comparison groups. However, better-succeeding students read significantly longer the very first task-relevant sentences of the case task indicating that they were able to focus on relevant information and discard the task-redundant text parts. Based on the results, pedagogical suggestions for advancing higher education are discussed.