Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the Creation of Digital Flashcards to Enhance the Pre-Clinical Pharmacology Curriculum

Background: Facilitating the study of pharmacological concepts is often a challenge for medical schools, as the AAMC National Graduation Questionnaire report showed in highlighting pharmacology as an area in the curriculum requiring improvement. Providing pharmacopoeias to students in table format is an inadequate solution, as massed presentation of content has proven to be suboptimal for learning. These challenges lead students to seek extracurricular support through the use of digital flashcards such as Anki, a popular open-source software. This presents its own challenges, as producing flashcards is time-consuming and initially challenging, and student-created cards may convey inaccurate medical content.

Description: To address these challenges, we formed an interdisciplinary workgroup, consisting of a librarian, instructional designers, a data scientist, medical faculty, and school leadership. This workgroup developed and implemented ancillary flashcards across all organ systems in the spring of 2021. In total, the workgroup created 22 Anki flashcard decks with 501 individual flashcards in 5 organ system pre-clinical modules. Each flashcard tested Indications, Mechanisms of Action, and Major Side Effects, and links to the institution’s drug formularies. To optimize learners’ cognitive load, the flashcard design included different instructional and multimedia design principles, which will be covered in this paper. After implementation, we sought to examine the impact of the newly introduced flashcard decks by measuring student exam performance and their digital experience as provided in end-of-module feedback surveys, compared to the previous cohort who did not use school-provided flashcard decks.

Conclusion: While the results did not show that using flashcards correlated with improved student performance on tests, we did find an improvement in student attitudes regarding the difficulty of pharmacology. After the implementation, fewer students mentioned that pharmacology was a difficult topic. Students continuously rated the pharmacology flashcards as a useful resource in the curriculum. We believe that this innovation is an important improvement in the pharmacology curriculum, as it enables students to study using self-directed and spaced repetition learning techniques. In addition, the librarian's involvement led to the inclusion of drug formulary links, ensuring that the flashcards continue to be relevant. Because of its success and positive reception, the school is now continuing to improve the availability of pre-made flashcard decks to pre-clinical students,, expanding it to other areas, such as hematology glossaries, and illness scripts.