Designing Course Plans for First-Year Biology Education in the Faculty of Pharmacy, Based on National Examination Performance Records

In recent years, an increasing number of universities have been faced with the problem of diversifying the academic skills of students entering the School of Pharmacy. This problem is also considered to be important in our university, and it is necessary to develop an education that will enable more students to reach a certain level in the long term. In this context, the Faculty of Pharmacy of our University recommends an education that is aware of the national examinations from the first year. This recommendation will make students aware of the way to learn from an early stage and equip them with the necessary knowledge and skills. To provide the education with the awareness of the national examination in the first-year biology courses, the authors conducted a document analysis of the biology sections of the national pharmacy examinations (81st to 107th). This analysis yielded data on the technical terms used in each session of the national examination, the number of words used, and the most frequently appearing words. To integrate this information into the authors' lectures on biology and basic physiology, the indexes of the texts used in each lecture were compared with all the technical terms used in the national pharmacist examinations. The overlapping words were set as essential words to be covered in the lecture. Furthermore, to develop lesson plans based on the list of keywords, the relevant keywords have been allocated according to the headings of the table of contents of the text, and a concept map has been developed for each heading with the help of those keywords. The concept map is characterized by the ability to visually organize and share complex information, and to easily collate the organized information. Teachers in charge of each course reviewed the concept maps they had created with each other and coordinated their lesson plans across courses, such as whether overlapping content should be taught in one course or repeated in each course. Finally, in this paper, lesson plans corresponding to the revised curriculum for 2024 for biology and basic physiology in the first-year education process at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Health Sciences University of Hokkaido were developed based on analysis data from the national pharmacist examinations and while collaboration between subjects with using the concept map.