Engaging persons with disabilities as community teachers for experiential learning in occupational therapy education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Cultivating empathy towards persons with disabilities has been highlighted as an essential graduate attribute in the occupational therapy profession. Purpose With the aim to developing a more holistic understanding of disability, this project seeks to translate an experiential learning activity developed in Canada to the local Singaporean context. Small groups of two to three students were paired with a person with physical disability, known as a community teacher, for a series of visits to observe and participate in their self-care, productivity and leisure activities. Method A sequential explanatory mixed methods design was adopted with the administration of an adapted version of the Multidimensional Attitudes Scale Towards Persons with Disabilities on 51 first year occupational therapy students. Seventeen students participated in three focus group discussions at the end of the learning activity. Findings: Comparison of pre- and post-scores using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests of all three subscales of the Multidimensional Attitudes Scale Towards Persons with Disabilities yielded significant improvements. The average score for Affect improved from 42.94 to 32.08, z = −5.43, P < .001; for Cognition improved from 26.12 to 21.41, z = −4.20, P < .001; for Behaviour improved from 23.78 to 20.65, z= −4.44, P < .001. Effect sizes ranged from medium to large. Thematic analysis of focus groups led to the identification of four themes that explained these improvements. Implications: Experiential learning can be effective in cultivating empathy and improving attitudes of occupational therapy students towards persons with disabilities. There is potential to expand this pedagogical approach to other health sciences disciplines.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".