Lorraine Carlson Garavalia: Pharmacy Educator Who Rewired How PharmD Students Learn

Lorraine Carlson Garavalia, PhD, is a pharmacy education researcher and former associate dean who specialized in curriculum assessment, active learning, and psychometric evaluation of student outcomes in professional pharmacy programs. Her work helped institutions move from intuition-based curriculum decisions to evidence-driven academic improvement.

Who Is Lorraine Carlson Garavalia? The Career in Full

She didn’t start in a pharmacy lab. That’s the first thing worth knowing.

Dr. Garavalia earned her PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of South Carolina — a field concerned with how learning happens, not what is learned. That distinction matters enormously. It meant she arrived in pharmacy education with a different set of questions than most faculty: not “what should students know?” but “how do we actually know they know it, and what do we do when they don’t?”

That framing would define three decades of work.

Her career unfolded across two major institutions. At the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC) School of Pharmacy, she served as both Assistant Dean of Assessment and, later, Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs — a span covering roughly 2009 to 2015. She then moved west to join the Western University of Health Sciences College of Pharmacy in California as Professor and Associate Dean for Assessment, where she focused on accreditation readiness, curriculum evaluation, and academic quality assurance.

As of 2026, she has stepped back from full-time academic appointments and works as an independent consultant — helping universities strengthen their assessment systems and prepare for ACPE reviews.

The Research That Actually Changed Pharmacy Classrooms

Here’s the thing: most faculty publish. Fewer publish work that gets adopted.

Garavalia’s research landed in practice. Three areas stand out.

The Flipped Classroom Study (AJPE, 2019)

The 2019 study co-authored by Kugler, Gogineni, and Garavalia — published in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education under DOI 10.5688/ajpe7044 — examined predictors of pharmacy student performance in a flipped classroom curriculum.

The flipped model, for those unfamiliar: students engage with lecture content before class, then use class time for case work, problem-solving, and discussion. The research found that students in the flipped curriculum showed measurable differences in both written and clinical exam performance — but the effect wasn’t uniform. Preparation behaviors and self-regulation predicted outcomes more than the model itself.

That nuance is what separates this study from the wave of enthusiasm articles that followed the flipped classroom trend. The data said: it works, but only when students actually do the pre-work.

Most people assume flipped classrooms are a simple upgrade from lectures. The data says otherwise — student self-regulation habits determine whether the model succeeds or stalls.

Redesigning Pharmacokinetics — The Long Game

Pharmacokinetics is notoriously difficult. It’s mathematical, abstract, and clinically consequential. Pharmacy students who don’t internalize it aren’t just failing a test — they’re missing a framework for dosing decisions they’ll make as practitioners.

Garavalia participated in a multi-year project redesigning pharmacokinetics instruction using active learning strategies: case studies, simulations, and applied problem-solving replacing lecture-heavy delivery. Results showed improved exam scores and — more telling — improved conceptual retention. Students weren’t just passing. They were understanding the why behind drug behavior in the body.

Or maybe I should say it this way: the difference between passing pharmacokinetics and understanding pharmacokinetics is the difference between a pharmacist who can retrieve an answer and one who can reason through a novel patient scenario. That’s what the redesign was targeting.

PCOA Research: Using Exam Data to Fix Curricula, Not Just Grade Students

The Pharmacy Curriculum Outcomes Assessment (PCOA) is the standardized exam administered by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) to PharmD students, typically in years two and three. Most schools use it to see where their students rank.

Garavalia’s research asked a harder question: what does PCOA data actually tell you about curriculum gaps — and are schools using it that way?

Her work helped pharmacy programs move from using PCOA as a report card to using it as a diagnostic instrument. That’s a meaningful shift. A school that sees weak PCOA performance in pharmacotherapy, for instance, doesn’t just know its students scored low — it has a signal to examine course sequencing, prerequisite preparation, and instructional methods in that domain.

Before the Classrooms: The Clopidogrel Adherence Research

This part of her career gets overlooked. Every article about Garavalia leads with education. That’s accurate — but incomplete.

Before pivoting fully to educational research, she contributed to clinical pharmacy work examining medication adherence in cardiovascular patients, particularly those prescribed clopidogrel following coronary stent placement. Two specific publications document this:

• Garavalia L, Garavalia B, Spertus JA, Decker C. “Exploring patients’ reasons for discontinuance of heart medications.” Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, 2009. DOI: 10.1097/JCN.0b013e3181ae7b2a
• Decker C, Garavalia L, Garavalia B, Spertus JA. “Clopidogrel-taking behavior by drug-eluting stent patients: discontinuers and continuers.” Patient Preferences and Adherence, 2008.

The findings explored the gap between what clinicians assume about patient adherence and what patients actually report — what the 2011 study called clinician-patient discord.

Some experts argue that this early clinical research is unrelated to her pharmacy education legacy. That’s valid for cataloguing purposes. But if you’re trying to understand why her educational work always centered on real-world practitioner outcomes — not just test scores — the clinical background explains a lot. She understood what happens when knowledge gaps reach patients.

Quick Comparison: Garavalia’s Two Major Institutional Roles

What Most Guides Skip: The Assessment Infrastructure She Actually Built

Faculty publish papers. Administrators build systems. Garavalia did both — and the systems are the part that outlast any individual article.

At UMKC, she developed structured assessment systems designed to move curriculum review away from end-of-year gut checks and toward continuous, data-driven evaluation. Faculty didn’t just get told students were struggling — they got data that identified which learning objectives weren’t landing and which course elements might be causing the gap.

At WesternU, she extended this into accreditation infrastructure. ACPE reviews require programs to demonstrate systematic assessment cycles — not just collect data, but show they’re acting on it. Garavalia’s work gave those programs the documentation frameworks and analytical habits to do that credibly.

What most guides skip is that curriculum assessment isn’t primarily about the students in the building right now — it’s about making programs durable enough to maintain quality across faculty turnover, changing cohorts, and evolving accreditation standards.

According to AACP’s Academic Pharmacy Vital Statistics (2023), there are 5,974 full-time pharmacy faculty across 142 accredited programs in the U.S. — yet structured systems for institutional knowledge transfer in curriculum assessment remain inconsistently developed across the field. That’s the gap Garavalia’s career spent addressing.

Teaching Style and Faculty Development

She taught psychometrics, educational measurement, research methods, and curriculum design — not exactly crowd-pleasing subject lines. These are graduate-level courses that require students to think carefully about how knowledge is tested, not just what is tested.

Colleagues described her as someone who could make measurement theory actionable. That’s harder than it sounds. Psychometrics without practical application is abstract. Garavalia’s approach connected statistical concepts directly to the decisions pharmacy faculty make every day: how to write a valid exam question, how to interpret score distributions, when a poor class average signals a bad test versus a gap in instruction.

Look, if you’re a pharmacy educator trying to build faculty competency in assessment design, the challenge isn’t finding the content. It’s finding someone who can teach it in a way that doesn’t make experienced clinician-educators feel like they’re back in a statistics course they barely passed. That’s the skill her mentorship provided.

Frequently Asked Questions About Lorraine Carlson Garavalia

What is Lorraine Carlson Garavalia known for in pharmacy education?

She’s known for research on flipped classroom learning, active learning in PharmD curricula, and PCOA-based curriculum assessment. She held associate dean roles at UMKC and Western University of Health Sciences over roughly 15 years of academic leadership.

Where did Lorraine Garavalia earn her doctorate?

She earned her PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of South Carolina. That background in learning science — rather than clinical pharmacy — shaped her entire research focus on how students learn and how programs measure that learning.

How many publications does Lorraine Carlson Garavalia have?

She has authored or co-authored more than 75 peer-reviewed academic publications, which have accumulated over 1,300 citations in academic literature across pharmacy education and clinical research.

What is the PCOA and why did Garavalia’s research on it matter?

The PCOA is a standardized exam administered by NABP that pharmacy schools use to assess student knowledge across the curriculum. Garavalia’s research focused on how programs can use PCOA data diagnostically — to identify curriculum gaps — rather than simply ranking students or cohorts.

Is Lorraine Carlson Garavalia still active in pharmacy education?

As of 2026, she has retired from full-time faculty positions. She works as an independent consultant helping pharmacy programs with curriculum evaluation, accreditation preparation, and assessment system design.