A performance rating scale for evaluating clinical competence of occupational therapy students

This study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of a 53-item rating scale, the Field Work Performance Report (FWPR), developed to evaluate the performance of occupational therapy students during field work. University faculty and field work supervisors from five different geographic regions in the United States participated in instrument construction. The FWPR was field-tested on a standardization group of 934 student affiliates. An item-analysis and cross-validation design was used to investigate instrument reliability and validity. When FWPR ratings were correlated with other supervisor ratings of student performance, validity coefficients for this scale ranged from .62 to .83. The tests of reliability yielded an inter-rater correlation coefficient of .75, where the consistency coefficient was .97. The FWPR has now been adopted as the official instrument of the AOTA for evaluation of field work performance.