Development and Content Validity of the Personal-Professional Development Tool for Occupational Therapy Students During Community-Based Service Learning

Abstract

As community-based service-learning becomes more widely used in occupational therapy (OT) education, valid and reliable outcome measures are needed to ensure that student learning outcomes are meaningfully and consistently measured. Currently, educators may use instructor-developed questionnaires that have not been validated or employ narrowly focused or overly prescriptive surveys borrowed from other disciplines that may not fully capture the skills that are necessary for competent entry-level practice. Grounded in the Occupational Adaptation Model, the Personal-Professional Development Tool (PPDT) was developed to meet this need. The PPDT was designed as a non-normative, self-referential rating scale that OT students use to set their own learning goals and to self-rate and reflect on their relative mastery of selected skills before and after participation in service-learning. To establish content validity of the PPDT, six experts rated the relevance of each of the 29 test items for measuring the central construct of student personal-professional development. Item-level Content Validity Index (I-CVI) was calculated for each item and adjusted for chance agreements. Twenty-seven items had excellent I-CVI (≥ 0.8) and were retained. Two items had fair I-CVI (0.67) and were revised. With acceptable Scale-level Content Validity Index (S-CVI = 0.91), pilot testing of the revised PPDT in the field is warranted. The PPDT may be a powerful tool to help guide OT students through a community-based service-learning experience by facilitating their setting learning goals, rating their performance, and reflecting on their personal-professional development.

Keywords

• service learning
• experiential learning
• instrument development
• instrument validation
• self-assessment