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PURPOSE. The purpose of this study was to gain a comprehensive understanding of the facilitators of and barriers to learning within occupational therapy fieldwork education from the perspective of both Canadian and American students.
METHOD. A qualitative study using an online open survey format was conducted to gather data from 29 occupational therapy students regarding their fieldwork experiences. An inductive grounded theory approach to content analysis was used.
RESULTS. Individual, environmental, educational, and institutional facilitators of and barriers to learning within occupational therapy fieldwork education were identified.
CONCLUSION. This study's findings suggest that learning within fieldwork education is a highly individual and dynamic process that is influenced by numerous factors. The new information generated by this study has the potential to positively affect the future design and implementation of fieldwork education.
Recent studies have suggested that occupational therapy fieldwork education, with its current emphasis on supervisory education, fails to maximize student learning and fails to adequately provide students with the skills and knowledge required to be competent and confident entry-level clinicians (Hodgetts et al., 2007; Lester, 1995; Toal-Sullivan, 2006). These research findings are a call to action to change the way fieldwork education is currently designed and delivered. Stefl-Mabry, Radlick, and Doane (2010) and Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (2004) are among a growing number of education theorists advocating for "the inclusion of student voice[s] in efforts toward educational reform" (Stefl-Mabry et al., 2010, p. 65). Stefl-Mabry and colleagues argued that students should not be considered as mere "passive consumers of information" (p. 65) but rather as collaborators in their own learning experience. To gain a greater understanding of occupational therapy students' learning experience in fieldwork education, a literature search was conducted using several online databases (OTDBASE, OT Search, and Google Scholar) and relevant keywords (student perspectives, occupational therapy, fieldwork education, and learning). The following is a brief summary of the search results to help readers better situate this research study within the larger body of knowledge published on learning in occupational therapy fieldwork education.
A recent study by Doherty, Stagnitti, and Schoo (2009) suggested that students consider block placements (longer duration fieldwork experiences) to be more beneficial to their overall learning than nontraditional (shorter) placements. Hummell (1997), in a quest to gather student perspectives...