Assessment of fieldwork practice: The student experience

Abstract

Assessment of fieldwork is common to all occupational therapy courses. This form of competency based assessment has been researched across many healthcare professions. Work on the appraisal of fieldwork assessments used by occupational therapy courses in the United Kingdom is just beginning. At the present time there appears a gap in information concerning the experience of fieldwork assessment from the student's perspective. This article seeks to address this by reporting the findings of a qualitative study of third year undergraduate occupational therapy students at University College Northampton to investigate their experience of being assessed on fieldwork. The results showed that students expressed high levels of acceptance with the primary fieldwork assessment, the fieldwork profile. However they displayed some concern about its reliability. A major influence on the assessment process was seen to be the fieldwork educator and the supervisory relationship. In general older students appeared to have a greater degree of control over both the assessment process and the supervisory relationship. As a result of the study it would appear that a national exploration of the assessments used to assess competence of occupational therapy graduates could be beneficial to the profession.