Foong FW*, WAJIMA Rikako, MATSUNO Hikari, HASEGAWA Keito, and OGASAWARA Hiroyuki
Article first published online: January 31, 2015
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Abstract

Purpose: We investigated the perceptions of oral presentations (OPs) given by 168 pharmacy students. Methods: Year-2 university students of either gender were divided into teams of 3-5 each, and 3 teams (or 1 group) per chapter presented their respectively allocated topics in biology, chemistry, and physics (total: 9 groups). Each class was asked to fill out a questionnaire at the end of each 3-chapter session. Students prepared and conducted OP sessions in a ‘rotation’ system (each had a chance to serially do English OP => Japanese summary => illustration guide) as a team. Apart from evaluation by marking one or more items from the OP program (subject specialty, useful, meaningful, not meaningful, ordinary, and/or not useful) and presentation content (excellent, interesting/stimulating, good, not good, hopeless, and/or boring), students were also asked to appropriate feedback items in the questionnaire after OP sessions. Results: The effective response rates for OP program/content and perception feedback were 98.2 and 90.0% respectively. For OP program, the cumulative rate was 66.4% (90.3% including item ‘ordinary’). As for content ranking (excellent, interesting/stimulating and/or good), the cumulative rate for positive items was 81.5%. The most frequently stated feedback item was that students had learned to do OP in English, followed by their ability to use/understand SE better than before the OP program. Discussion: A majority of students found the OP program offered subject specialty, useful and/or meaningful, and the contents were excellent, interesting/stimulating and/or good. Together, post-OP feedback items demonstrated that the students had acquired OP skills and improved SE ability.

Keywords: Pharmaceutical cience English, oral presentation, affirmative feedback