Hiroshi SAIMARU

For decades, the declining 18-year-old population has led to increased college enrollment rates, admitting a broader range of students with varying levels of academic abilities. Therefore, the Faculty of Pharmacy is modernizing and personalizing learning support to strengthen student proficiency in specialized subjects. For example, at the Faculty of Pharmacy, we are strengthening our academic portfolio by integrating Institutional Research (IR), leveraging IT to enhance analytical capabilities in academic affairs, applying Instructional Design (ID) to improve the learning environment, and providing academic counseling tailored to each student’s cognitive style and motivation. These initiatives have started to yield positive outcomes. However, as we remain in a transitional phase, fundamental reforms in learning support are still needed. These include assessing and supporting students’ proficiency levels in their early years and improving the overall quality of learning. To address these issues, in August 2024, we organized a symposium on “Academic Support Reform for Pharmacy Students” at the 9th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Pharmaceutical Education. During the symposium, we discussed findings from case studies conducted at four pharmaceutical universities, highlighting key insights and challenges. We hope this report offers valuable insights for enhancing educational support for pharmacy students facing learning difficulties.

Due to the diversity of lifestyle habits of residents within each of the 47 Japanese prefectures, the prefecture-based dataset in NDB Open Data Japan is pragmatic and useful for epidemiologically investigating the association between lifestyle habits and the prevalence of disorders of interest. It would be important to raise the alarm about the lifestyle habits identified in the present study to reduce the risk of developing the corresponding disorders.

The decline in pharmacy student’s academic performance among pharmacy students has become an issue. Universities are responding by implementing measures to ensure quality in pharmacy education. Moreover, we also provide support from the early stages of study. In the final year, which is particularly important, we conduct a national examination-style test to evaluate the students’ learning status and individual interviews based on their learning status. Although the relationship between the performance of mock examinations and success and failure of the national examination has been analyzed, the effectiveness of the individual interviews has not been determined. In this study, we validated the effects of interviews by focusing on the difference in the number of interviews, the subject’s performance, and the timing of the interviews. First, the method and effectiveness of the interviews conducted during the academic years 2017–2021 were validated. Subsequently, the method for conducting interviews in the academic year 2022 was determined based on the verification results. The method was used to conduct interviews in the academic year 2022, and the effectiveness of the interviews was verified. As a result of examining the impact of various interview methods on interview effectiveness, conducting interviews with a wide range of students at an early stage is important. Moreover, we found that the effect of conducting interviews with the same student multiple times is minimal.