An assessment of the level of moral development of American and Canadian pharmacy students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Context Moral reasoning assessment is an assessment of conceptual adequacy of moral thinking. It attempts to tap the basic conceptual frameworks that individuals use to analyse social-moral problems and to judge the proper course of action. It is a significant construct because of its pragmatic and positive relationship to clinical performance in health professionals. Thus, pharmacy students at higher levels of moral reasoning can be expected to perform at higher levels on clinical performance measurements. Objective To examine the moral reasoning of pharmacy students at schools of pharmacy in the United States and Canada. Method Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT) was used as a surrogate measure of pharmacy students' moral reasoning and was completed by all first-year pharmacy students at one school of pharmacy in the US and one in Canada. Results The results indicated that significant differences existed between the Canadian and American pharmacy students. The Canadian students scored significantly higher than their American counterparts. The mean moral reasoning score of both classes was lower than previous empirical research results from other first-year health professional students. The results are discussed along with potential educational interventions and suggestions for selecting pharmacy students to schools of pharmacy. Conclusion This is the first study to have assessed moral reasoning in pharmacy students. The reasons for differences between US and Canadian students are unknown. The lower scores of pharmacy students compared with other student health professionals indicate that further research is needed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".