Pharmacy educators are grappling with concerns around curriculum overload and core pharmacist competencies in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex healthcare landscape. Adaptive expertise provides a conceptual framework to guide educators as they design instructional activities that can support students on their journey towards becoming pharmacists who can perform procedural tasks efficiently, as well as creatively handle new and difficult-to-anticipate problems that arise regularly in pharmacy practice. This article explores undergraduate pharmacy education through a cognitive psychology lens and foregrounds three instructional design strategies which support the development of adaptive expertise: (1) cognitive integration, (2) productive failure, and (3) inventing with contrasting cases. These three evidence-based strategies cultivate long-term learning and provide a practical mechanism to combat curriculum overload and backwards-facing assessments. Pharmacy education can encourage the development of procedural and conceptual knowledge and position pharmacy students to excel as they move into more complicated and ambiguous roles in our healthcare system.
Keywords: adaptive expertise; cognitive integration; pharmacy education; productive failure.