Date Presented 04/06/19
The OCIA provides a tool to promote students’ reflection on clinical experiences, giving educators a method to address the dissonance in clinical experiences and academic education. Using the OCIA as a tool to modify interventions to increase occupation-centered practice, further embracing the profession’s philosophy, may be one strategy to facilitate professional socialization.
Primary Author and Speaker: Vanessa Jewell
Additional Authors and Speakers: LouAnn Griswold
PURPOSE: Facilitating students to embrace the values of the profession and claim their identity as occupational therapists is critical to the profession and yet socialization into the profession has little research attention. Students learn about the profession’s identity and philosophy, yet engage in fieldwork in settings that may counter their education. Ashby, Adler, and Herbert (2016) reported that students place greater value on their practice-based experience in their education than they do didactic education. They identified the need to provide students with opportunity to reflect on their observations and practice experiences to help students recognize the dissonance in their practical and didactic education. The Occupation Centered Intervention Assessment (OCIA) is a tool to promote reflection on intervention specifically examining the ecological validity, occupational relevance, and client-centered nature of interventions. The OCIA has established content validity, utility, and inter-rater reliability (Jewell & Pickens, 2017) and has been used with occupational therapists working in school-based settings and pediatric and adult physical rehabilitation facilities. However, the use of the OCIA has not been demonstrated as a tool to promote reflection on intervention with students. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the OCIA influences master’s level occupational therapy students’ professional reasoning and ability to plan and implement occupation-centered interventions.
METHODS: After completion of Level II fieldwork, 61 occupational therapy master’s level students completed OCIA training and a 7-question reflection on the utility and relevance of the tool for fieldwork and future practice as clinicians. Three researchers followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis process including: reading and re-reading the records, generation of 48 initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing the themes, and defining and naming the final three themes. Trustworthiness was established through researcher triangulation, reflexivity, keeping an audit trail, and providing a thick description.
RESULTS: Three themes emerged from the data: promotes reflection for practice, support of the student’s professional identity, and future use of the OCIA in practice. Reflection on practice included subthemes of recognizing use of occupation-centered practice to recognizing changes that they could have made to increase occupation-centered intervention, even in challenging settings. Support of the students’ professional identity comments related to understanding the complexity of occupation-centered practice using the three continua of the OCIA, to transitioning from mirroring their fieldwork educators’ practice to independently planning occupation-centered interventions. Discussing their future use of the OCIA referred to students’ noting the visual layout of the OCIA and quick scoring to promote easy and creative modifications in future interventions.
CONCLUSION: The OCIA provides a tool to promote students’ reflection on clinical experiences, giving educators a method to discuss the dissonance in clinical experiences and academic education. Using the OCIA as a tool to modify interventions to increase occupation-centered practice, further embracing the profession’s philosophy may be one strategy to facilitate professional socialization.
IMPACT STATEMENT: The OCIA has the potential to bridge didactic coursework to fieldwork practice, potentially preparing reflective, creative, and confident entry-level practitioners.
References
Ashby, S. E., Adler, J., & Herbert, L. (2016). An exploratory international study into occupational therapy students’ perceptions of professional identity. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, 63, 233-243.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, 77-101.
