Occupational Therapy Students’ Evidence-Based Practice Skills as Reported in a Mobile App: Cross-Sectional Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Evidence-based practice (EBP) is an important aspect of the health care education curriculum. EBP involves following the 5 EBP steps: ask, assess, appraise, apply, and audit. These 5 steps reflect the suggested core competencies covered in teaching and learning programs to support future health care professionals applying EBP. When implementing EBP teaching, assessing outcomes by documenting the student's performance and skills is relevant. This can be done using mobile devices. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to assess occupational therapy students' EBP skills as reported in a mobile app. METHODS: We applied a cross-sectional design. Descriptive statistics were used to present frequencies, percentages, means, and ranges of data regarding EBP skills found in the EBPsteps app. Associations between students' ability to formulate the Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome/Population, Interest, and Context (PICO/PICo) elements and identifying relevant research evidence were analyzed with the chi-square test. RESULTS: Of 4 cohorts with 150 students, 119 (79.3%) students used the app and produced 240 critically appraised topics (CATs) in the app. The EBP steps "ask," "assess," and "appraise" were often correctly performed. The clinical question was formulated correctly in 53.3% (128/240) of the CATs, and students identified research evidence in 81.2% (195/240) of the CATs. Critical appraisal checklists were used in 81.2% (195/240) of the CATs, and most of these checklists were assessed as relevant for the type of research evidence identified (165/195, 84.6%). The least frequently correctly reported steps were "apply" and "audit." In 39.6% (95/240) of the CATs, it was reported that research evidence was applied. Only 61% (58/95) of these CATs described how the research was applied to clinical practice. Evaluation of practice changes was reported in 38.8% (93/240) of the CATs. However, details about practice changes were lacking in all these CATs. A positive association was found between correctly reporting the "population" and "interventions/interest" elements of the PICO/PICo and identifying research evidence (P<.001). CONCLUSIONS: We assessed the students' EBP skills based on how they documented following the EBP steps in the EBPsteps app, and our results showed variations in how well the students mastered the steps. "Apply" and "audit" were the most difficult EBP steps for the students to perform, and this finding has implications and gives directions for further development of the app and educational instruction in EBP. The EBPsteps app is a new and relevant app for students to learn and practice EBP, and it can be used to assess students' EBP skills objectively.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.008 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".