Agency and community: second-year students actively co-constructing understanding of requirements of a complex and authentic occupational therapy assessment task

Background: Engaging students in pre-assessment activities designed to promote the social construction of knowledge of assessment requirements, criteria and standards has been shown to significantly improve student performance (Rust, Price, & O'Donovan, 2003).

Initiative/Practice: The aim of this project was to actively engage second-year, occupational therapy students in workshops, wherein they collaborated with peers, to construct understanding of the complex and contextual requirements of an occupational profiling and intervention planning task. Methods: A series of three workshops was conducted in 2015. In the first workshop, students were presented with frequently asked questions from previous cohorts and, drawing on their collective experience of authentic assessment in the first-year program, worked in groups to construct handy hints. Tutors collated the hints and, in the second workshop, presented them to students, providing further opportunity for discussion and an ongoing support resource. The third workshop focused on emergent questions with final refinement of the handy hints. Students were invited to participate in a post-assessment online survey, comprising likert scale, yes/no and open-ended questions, to gain their feedback on the efficacy of the workshops. Evidence of effectiveness: Of the 61 students enrolled in the subject, 40 (65.5%) completed the survey. The majority of students agreed that: 1) the purpose of the workshops was clear; 2) they felt comfortable participating in the workshops; 3) the hints were useful for their learning; 4) the hints clarified assessment expectations; 5) they used the hints when completing the task; and 6) they felt more enabled to independently understand future assessment requirements. Students' qualitative responses communicated suggestions for future workshop development. The findings of this pilot project have led the team to adopt the 'social constructivist process model' of assessment (Rust, O'Donovan, & Price, 2005) more broadly across the first and second years of the occupational therapy curriculum.