How to Balance Teaching the Conceptual and Practice-based Products of Occupational Science with Teaching the Science Itself

Aims/Intent: To present, and explore implications from, a study conducted by the forum team on how educational programs addressed occupation, with particular attention to how educators represented occupational science (Hooper, et al., 2016). Rationale: The forum team used a basic qualitative research design to explore how occupational therapy and occupational therapy assistant programs in the US addressed occupation. All educational programs were stratified by geographical region and institutional type and then randomly selected. Key informants from twenty-five programs were interviewed about how they addressed occupation and were asked to submit representative artifacts and videorecorded class sessions. Data were coded using both inductive and deductive coding strategies. This forum presents data coded as ‘occupational science.’ These data suggested occupational science was infused in occupational therapy education through the concepts and research findings the science has generated, which were sometimes translated by educators for practice. Occupational science was a label for a few assignments and was a topic within lectures on the historical development of occupational therapy. The data reviewed rarely included teaching the science itself. Based on these findings, the forum explores with participants these questions: Clark (2006) claimed that “theoretical fragmentation” could threaten the sustainability of occupational science. Is distributing and teaching the products of occupational science across a curriculum, detached from learning the science itself, a form of theoretical fragmentation? How might learning concepts derived from occupational science apart from learning about the scientific discipline—the commitments, processes and people that collectively birthed those concepts—affect students’ professional identities? If educators teach occupational science concepts applied to therapy and detached from the science itself, how might that support or detract from a translation and implementation occupational science (Wright-St.Clair & Hocking, 2014)? What resources are needed to support teaching occupational science itself in addition to the products of the science? Intended Participant Outcomes: To unify teaching occupational science with teaching the conceptual and practice-based products of the science; To generate pedagogical approaches and resources that increase the presence of occupational science in education. To clarify the importance of a systematic translational occupational science in light of educators’ informal “translation” of occupational science concepts for practice

How student knowledge and application of occupation is assessed and measured: A national study

Leaders and scholars consider occupation core and threshold knowledge for occupational therapy (Fortune and Kennedy-Jones, 2014), yet how it is conveyed through education is not well understood. This national study examined how faculty teach and assess student knowledge of occupation and its application in practice in US programs. Using a qualitative descriptive research design, we analyzed interviews, video recordings, and artifacts of teaching occupation collected from 25 programs, chosen using stratified random sampling. The research team analyzed Interview data using an inductive, constant comparative approach; video and artifact data were analyzed using findings from the interviews (Krishnagiri, Hooper, Price, Taff, & Bilics, 2017). For this study, the research team analyzed a subset of data to examine how faculty assess student knowledge and application of occupation. All participants described desired outcomes related to occupation, yet analysis revealed there was very little actual measurement of learning the concept. When faculty did measure the concept, they almost exclusively assessed student knowledge related to occupation applied in the occupational therapy process. Few examples exist of criteria to measure student knowledge of occupation beyond its relation to the occupational therapy process. Similar to the findings of the larger study of how occupation is taught in curricula, when faculty measured student’s knowledge about occupation, strategies of measurement ranged on a continuum from formal and direct to informal and indirect. It is unclear whether the limited assessment of learning occupation is related to a gap between desired learning outcomes and outcome assessments, faculty assumption that students have mastered the concept and its application in practice, a lack of understanding of assessment development, or variability of faculty knowledge regarding occupation. The intersection of knowledge of occupation and the ability to design instructional strategies to effectively teach and assess the concept is called pedagogical content knowledge (Zepke, 2013). Each of these potential barriers to assessing student knowledge of occupation has implications for faculty development in education. Questions for discussion: 1) As occupational scientists, what can we do in terms of faculty development regarding increasing faculty understanding of occupation and how to assess students’ knowledge? 2) How do participants assess students’ knowledge of occupation? 3 key terms: occupation in education, assessment of occupation, pedagogical content knowledg