The University of South Alabama

The University of South Alabama
Department of Occupational Therapy

Remediation Ideas for Intervention Deficits

Your departmental policy and procedure manual may contain specific performance criteria for conducting some evaluations or treatments. The student could possibly use these to conduct a self-evaluation of the task. Feedback during the process (specifically if it is therapeutic handling) provided by a more experienced therapist may be necessary to correct errors and prevent the student from developing bad habits. A review of relevant content about a process can often help students revise their own performance.

Fieldwork supervisors should ask the student to demonstrate or show how to accurately conduct something when discussing interventions. Think about how you would perform the task. What factors guided you in refining your procedures? We often revise our procedures during a task, based on the performance of the client. There are observations we make and expectations we have about process. More experienced therapists begin to make some of these adjustments about therapeutic handling and patient positioning without much conscious effort, but students must learn to attend to and adjust these procedures while engaged in the therapeutic activity.

Activities to help improve interventions include asking the student to:
Practice specific tasks until a certain level of competency is reached
Allow student to watch a videotape of a role model conducting this task. Have them record their observations about the role model’s performance. Ask them to identify steps of the task with an asterisk (*) that the role model does much more proficiently or accurately than they do. Now they know what to practice.

Have student create a procedural checklist of the task for themselves and others. Ask them to list the performance steps on the left side of the form and include a checklist and comments column on the right side. See example below:

Procedural Analysis for

__________________________

Task Steps	Accuracy check Ö	Comments:
1.
2.
3.
4. (or more)

Could they use this form now and observe someone and evaluate their proficiency with the task based on this checklist? Have them ask a peer or other therapist to observe them perform the task and utilize the checklist and complete the comments sections to help them further define their need to practice.

Videotape themselves performing specific tasks. Ask them to critique themselves. Students can use the newly created checklist form (see suggestion 3) to critique their own performance on the videotape.
Ask the student to role-play the procedure with another student or therapist. If it is an assessment tool, have the subjects try to role-play a variety of responses during testing so the student learns to grade or score a variety of responses or learns when to discontinue or re-instruct according to the test manual. If it is a treatment technique, have the subjects show a variety of responses so the student learns to respond to different scenarios.
Ask the student to write their own personal learning objective to measure improvements in performance. Be sure it includes measurable criteria, conditions, and timelines.
Ask the student to provide evidence-based research in order to explain why they choose certain interventions.

Questions? Email webmaster
Last updated: 09/30/2009 01:54 PM