Development of a Clinical Performance Assessment Tool for an Occupational Therapy Teaching Clinic

Health professional education is experiencing increased accountability from higher education and professional accrediting bodies to produce professionals who are prepared to meet the demands of the complex, fast-paced, ever changing health-care environment. Using competency-based assessment methods to evaluate a student’s performance can assist to decrease the gap between education and practice and ease the critical transition from the classroom to the clinic. A variety of assessment methods that use a CompetencyBased Medical Education (CBME) framework to assess student performance and competency can be found throughout the health professions literature. Because of the lack of literature about the assessment of student performance in occupational therapy education, and because of the inability to find an appropriate assessment tool for the on-site teaching clinics in the author’s program, the author developed a new assessment tool to measure student competency and performance in the clinical education setting. This paper discusses each phase of development; the professional literature used; and the reasoning for domain, item, and scoring selection. The final assessment includes a 5-point rating scale to score 42 items in six domains in order to assess student performance and competency during an occupational therapy teaching clinical education experience.