Developing the Change Agent Competencies of Occupational Therapy University Students: Using a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Approach in a Canadian Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian occupational therapy (OT) university programs must teach change agent competencies. These include promoting social justice and empowering clients, which United States occupational therapists also do. Change agent competency requirements are challenging to teach and involve multidisciplinary knowledge and non-traditional skills. As few occupational therapists feel competent to act as change agents, university programs must engage in a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) approach and identify areas of improvement. The aim of this study, informed by SoTL, was to document, as described by participants, the pedagogical activities related to teaching the change agent role in an OT program in Canada and explore possible curricular improvements. Two online 90-minute focus group meetings were held: one with ten teaching team members, the other with six current and past students. Participants were questioned regarding current formal and informal curricular activities, barriers that influenced competency development, and activities that could help improve it. Data were analyzed thematically. Actual informative teaching activities, such as ethics and multicultural courses, were deemed helpful but insufficient, with only one transformative course in the curriculum. Barriers such as a rigid, biomedical-based program structure also affected competency acquisition. Solutions to improve acquisition included mentorship and recognition of relevant extracurricular projects by the programs. SoTL offers a reflective lens to learn from collective experiences. This study showed the importance of involving students and faculty in program development and delivery improvements in order to better support educators and program administrators in their mission to meet the needs of vulnerable populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".