Date Presented 03/28/20
People with disabilities often cannot participate in the community due to barriers in the community environment. In this research presentation, we discuss an educational intervention designed to train entry-level OT students on community-environment accessibility evaluation. We will also describe the outcomes of this educational intervention on 41 students’ knowledge and skills.
Primary Author and Speaker: Ingris Treminio
Additional Authors and Speakers: Jaclyn Schwartz, Katelyn Blumenthal, Andrea Llano, Stephanie Pujol, Emily Serros, Rebecca Mojica
PURPOSE: People with disabilities are limited from participating in the community due to inaccessible environments. To improve community participation of people with disabilities, occupational therapy practitioners should be knowledgeable about accessibility evaluation for community spaces. The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of an educational intervention designed to improve entry-level occupational therapy students’ community accessibility evaluation knowledge and skills.
DESIGN: A quasi-experimental pre/post study design was used to investigate the impact of the educational intervention of occupational therapy students’ community accessibility knowledge and skills. Students were recruited from an assistive technology course offered in the entry level master’s in occupational therapy program.
METHODS: Occupational therapy students participated in an educational intervention designed to improve their knowledge of community accessibility evaluation. The intervention consisted of approximately a 90-minute lecture and a 3-hour lab. The lecture was a self-paced on-line learning module that described: 1) the background and importance of community accessibility, 2) theory to guide accessibility evaluation, 3) US policy affecting community accessibility, 4) universal design, and 5) standardized tools to evaluate community accessibility. For the lab, students were sent in pairs to evaluate a small building on campus using the AccessTools community accessibility evaluation app. The instruments in this study included a knowledge quiz on community accessibility topics covered in the lecture. The students were also shown a picture of a public bathroom and entrance. They were then were asked to describe any accessibility issues they saw in the photos. The students completed both instruments at the beginning and at the end of the educational intervention.
RESULTS: Forty-one master’s entry-level occupational therapy students completed the educational intervention. This was 93% of the students invited to participate. The training and evaluation process significantly improved students’ knowledge of community accessibility from pre-test (M=63.86, SD=10.60) to post-test (M=73.21, SD=10.86); t(40)=-5.36, p=.000. Students were more skilled at identifying accessibility issues in photos. In the picture of the entrance, students identified approximately more accessibility issues in the image of the entrance at post-test (M= 4.08, SD= 1.49); than at pre-test(M= 3.38, SD= 1.55); (t(39)= -2.91, P= .01). Students also identified more bathroom accessibility issues at post-test (M= 5.08, SD= 1.70) than pre-test (M= 4.35, SD= 1.37); (t(30)= -3.13, P= .01).
CONCLUSION: In this study, we described an educational intervention that helped occupational therapy students reach key competencies in knowledge and skills for community accessibility evaluation. The impact of this work is two-fold. First, it increases the evidence-base for occupational therapy educators looking to use science-driven teaching approaches. Second, it demonstrates to internal and external policy makers student’s training in analyzing environments to improve function. This training speaks to occupational therapists’ distinct value in environmental modifications.
References
Barclay, L., McDonald, R., Lentin, P., & Bourke-Taylor, H. (2016). Facilitators and barriers to social and community participation following spinal cord injury. Australian occupational therapy journal, 63(1), 19-28. https://doi.org/10.1111/1440-1630.12241
Umeda, C. J., Fogelberg, D. J., Jirikowic, T., Pitonyak, J. S., Mroz, T. M., & Ideishi, R. I. (2017). Expanding the implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act for populations with intellectual and developmental disabilities: the role of organization-level occupational therapy consultation. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 71(4), 7104090010p1-7104090010p6. https://doi.org/10.5014/ajot.2017.714001
Giles, A. K., Annan, D., Gober, A., & Greene, L. (2018). E-Learning Innovations: Implementation of Video in an Occupational Therapy Classroom. Journal of Occupational Therapy Education, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.26681/jote.2018.020103
Gee, B. M., Strickland, J., Thompson, K., & Miller, L. J. (2017). Exploring the influence of an e-learning sensory processing-based module for graduate level occupational therapy students on clinical reasoning: A pilot study. Occupational therapy international, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/6515084
