Performance Evaluation of Occupational Therapy Students: A Validity Study

Abstract

Objective evaluation of clinical competence is always a difficult task. Many attempts have been made to design an instrument for such evaluation. and Performance Evaluation of Occupational Therapy Students (PEOTS) is such an instrument. It was designed as a criterion-referenced evaluation of performance in four broad areas of clinical competence: professional interaction, assessment, programming and treatment. This instrument has enjoyed fairly broad acceptance based on its face validity alone. The purpose of this study was to collect preliminary data on the content and construct validity of the instrument. A sample of 43 new graduates from Canadian occupational therapy programs were evaluated on the job within the first year of their practice using PEOTS. The data were collected over a two year period and came from facilities across the country. Analysis of the results showed that the instrument had overall good content and construct validity. However, some low frequency items need to be investigated further and some items need to have their criterion levels changed.

Performance Evaluation of Occupational Therapy Students: A Reliability Study

“…Results from the validity study (Ernest & Polatajko, 1986) also indicated that the majority of items in the PEOTS were used frequently, suggesting good content validity of the evaluation instrument. A second study by Ernest (1988) demonstrated that many of the 122 PEOTS skills were generic or general in nature.…”

“…) involved and "deals with assessing the degree of accuracy in measuring the underlying elements (constructs) of a scale" (Adams & Schvaneveldt, 1985, p.84). Good construct validity of the PEOTS was suggested in the study by Ernest & Polatajko (1986) since the criteria set for new graduates was achieved. On many of the items, in fact, new graduates demonstrated a higher level of functioning than expected and scores appeared to cluster at the higher end of the rating scale.…”

“…Prior to the development of the PEOTS, Canadian University programmes in occupational therapy (there were nine at that time) had each designed fieldwork placement evaluations tools (Ernest, 1985). A desired goal was for the PEOTS to become the one common instrument used across Canada (Ernest & Polatajko, 1986).…”

“…A study to determine the content and construct validity of the PEOTS was conducted by Ernest & Polatajko in 1986. Content validity shows that the "items contained in an instrument, individually and as a whole, represent and adequately sample the domain being examined" (Asher, 1989, p.6).…”

“…The valid and reliable evaluation of clinical competence in occupational therapy, and other related professions, remains a challenge and has been the topic of many studies and publications (Emest & Polatajko 1986;Kem 8z Mickelson, 1971;Loomis, 1985;Matuscak, 1983;Morgan & Irby, 1978;Tower & Vosburgh, 1976). The focus of this paper is to report on a preliminary study of the reliability of the Performance Evaluation of Occupational Therapy Students (PEOTS) (Ernest & Polatajko, 1982).…”