Christian, Antonia, PT, MS

Research / Dissertation Abstract (Completion July, 2011)

During clinical education, clinical instructors are asked to accurately identify attitudes, characteristics and/or behaviors that are required for success in physical therapy practice. Unfortunately, it has been suggested that for various reasons, clinical instructors determine a student’s professional development from a general impression of their performance considering execution of skills and demonstration of behaviors as a whole, rather than distinctly (Wolfe –Burke, 2005). Tsudea (2007) found that students had concerns that the clinical instructors’ summative comments on the Clinical Performance Instrument did not include specific information on how or to what degree their performance must change to achieve entry level standards. Thus, a systematic examination and interpretation of all the narrative comments of the CPI will help to identify patterns, themes, biases, and meanings to assess how the student’s professional behaviors developed over the course of consecutive clinical education experiences. Applying the conceptual model — The Facilitation Process by Warren May (2003) —this retrospective content analysis will begin to expose potential gaps in the ways that clinical instructors communicate how a physical therapy student’s professional practice performance must develop to achieve entry level standards.