Writing a research proposal: A workshop course developed for Pharm D students

Background: Students typically need substantial assistance in writing research proposals since few have relevant experience. Aims: To describe a course for assisting students to write a research proposal. Method: Workshops consisted of a short lecture on writing a specific proposal component, a proposal outline, and an interactive class format using worksheets. Advising individual student groups was shared between the course instructor and project adviser. Rating scales were used for summative evaluation. Results: Proposals written during the course were rated higher (p<0.05) than were proposals written without the course. The mean knowledge rating was substantially higher on the post-test (4.3 on a scale of 0 to 5) than on the retrospective pretest (1.4; p<0.001). Conclusion: A course developed to enable students to write a proposal for a research study in which mentoring was shared between the project adviser and the course instructor, a focus on the writing aspects of proposal development, and a workshop class format, was associated with higher ratings of quality as well as higher ratings of knowledge learned.