Performance-Based Assessment on Dispensing Drugs in English of Thai Pharmacy Students.

Abstract

The objectives of this study were: 1) to create and validate the tasks for measuring English oral proficiency in dispensing drugs of Thai pharmacy students, 2) to create and validate the rubric for measuring English oral proficiency in dispensing drugs of Thai pharmacy students, and 3) to establish the extent of this dispensing task’s test-usefulness. The participants of this study are 2 informant specialists, 6 language instructors, 144 fifth-year pharmaceutical students of a university in Bangkok and 21 pharmacist experts. The research instruments are semi-structure interview with pharmacy students, a questionnaire for pharmacy students and pharmacy experts, and questions for semi-structure interview with raters. Apart from content analysis, one-way ANOVA and post hoc analysis were performed to investigate the agreement among pharmacy students and pharmacy experts, while Many-Facet Rasch Measurement (MFRM) was conducted to explore the criteria and the reliability of the test. Apart from obtaining the tasks, the rubric and the AUA, the study presented some interesting findings on each developing and validating process. In terms of linguistic, pharmacy experts did not view using correct English language and pronunciation correctly as important as the students. Furthermore, the training is needed to ensure that all raters are not different, especially the senior raters. Good training sessions should offer the raters the detail of their rating performance, which can be obtained from MFRM. The results show that 4 criteria need improvement with 2 criteria belonging to content knowledge not assessing the same dimension, which is supported by the interview data. The other 2 criteria that deal with linguistic and communication skills requires adjustment training on the step calibration. This result of this study can be adapted in developing future performance assessment relating to ESP and medical fields, especially pharmacy dispensing practice. It also offers implication on ESP assessment and reliability issue when developing performance assessment.