Ranges of Practical Experience
I am teaching Veterinary Pharmacology and it seems striking the differences in comprehension and retention among those students who have worked in the field for a while and are familiar with the drugs on a practical level vs those who are new and are learning all from scratch.
The practical experience that people have seems to cement the theory of why the drugs work so much more easily than people unfamilar with the drugs.
My question would be...how do I make the long lists of drug names and functions more "real" to those without previous exposure?
Nora,
I would suggest you try to tie an example, graphic illustration, case study or some other connector to each of the drugs being studied. What the experienced students are doing is pulling in their episodic memory because they have actually experienced how the drugs worked on the various animals. So the more connecting of examples and real life you can do for the inexperienced students the higher the retention rate is going to be. Otherwise the students are going to have to depend on their cognitive memory (rote memory) to retain the information and this is tough as you know.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
