# A Multicenter Study to Evaluate Veterinary Students' Confidence and Competence in Antimicrobial Selection

> **NIH FDA U18** · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · 2020 · $62,506

## Abstract

Antimicrobial drugs are critical to the practice of medicine whether the patients are
humans or animals. Annually, these drugs save millions of lives, but the rapid rise of
antimicrobial resistance threatens their utility. There is a need for improved antimicrobial
stewardship education across all healthcare settings including veterinary medicine. There has
been very little research into how best to teach the appropriate use of antimicrobials to
veterinary students and how best to assess their learning. This study brings together veterinary
microbiologists from across 5 academic institutions (University of Pennsylvania, Virginia Tech,
Colorado State University, Washington State University and the Ohio State University) to
develop and validate two rubrics that assess the quality of an antimicrobial choice and then
thoroughness of an antimicrobial therapy plan. Validity of the rubric will be assessed by the
consistency of score across different raters. The rubric will then guide the development of
teaching cases that will be freely available for teaching institutions following the study period.
These cases and rubrics will subsequently be used to evaluate the utility of a mnemonic device
called SODAPOP. We hypothesize that this mnemonic device will help students to make better
decisions when prescribing antimicrobials and create more thorough plans. We will assess
student confidence and competence in antimicrobial selection by an intervention study across
the five institutions with 250-300 veterinary students. First, students will be assigned a survey
and random cases from those previously developed. Then all students will be taught with
didactic “rounds” about antimicrobial drugs, but half of them will also be taught the SODAPOP
mnemonic. Then students will be assigned surveys and cases immediately following the
intervention and with two-week follow-up. We will assess the efficacy of SODAPOP by
comparison of survey and case scores from before and after the intervention. This study
develops and examines widely needed tools (standardized cases, rubrics and a mnemonic
device) for veterinary educators to teach and assess antimicrobial use. Improved education will
pair with other important stewardship efforts to improve the prescribing of these critical drugs
and slow the spread of antimicrobial resistant bacteria in veterinary medicine.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10144889
- **Project number:** 1U18FD006984-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
- **Principal Investigator:** Stephen Douglas Cole
- **Activity code:** U18 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** FDA
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $62,506
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-09-01 → 2022-10-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10144889

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10144889, A Multicenter Study to Evaluate Veterinary Students' Confidence and Competence in Antimicrobial Selection (1U18FD006984-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10144889. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*