An Assessment of Athletic Training Students' Clinical-Placement Hours

OBJECTIVE: To establish a time profile to determine how athletic training students use their time in clinical placements and to determine the effects of academic standing, sex, sport type, and risk of injury associated with a sport during athletic training students' clinical placements on instructional, clinical, unengaged, managerial, and active learning time. DESIGN AND SETTING: Subjects were enrolled in clinical placements within National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I athletics, intramural sports, and a local high school. Students were individually videotaped for approximately 4 hours. SUBJECTS: A total of 20 undergraduate athletic training students (17 women, 3 men) from a Committee on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs (CAAHEP)-accredited athletic training education program. MEASUREMENTS: We created a conceptual behavioral time framework to examine athletic training students' use of clinical-placement time with the performance domains associated with the 1999 National Athletic Trainers' Association Board of Certification Role Delineation Study. Students' use of time was analyzed with the Behavior Evaluation Strategies and Taxonomies software. RESULTS: Students spent 7% of their overall clinical-placement time in instructional activities, 23% in clinical activities, 10% in managerial activities, and 59% in unengaged activities. Using multiple 3 x 3 factorial analyses of variance, we found that advanced students were engaged in significantly more active learning and clinical time compared with novice and intermediate students. Students assigned to sports in which injuries predominately occur in the upper extremities (upper extremity sports) spent significantly more clinical-placement time unengaged compared with students assigned to sports in which injuries predominantly occur in the lower extremities (lower extremity sports) or in both upper and lower extremities (mixed extremity sports). CONCLUSIONS: In this exploratory study, we examined only the clinical-placement component of 1 athletic training program; therefore, it may not be accurate to generalize the results for all CAAHEP-accredited programs. However, these results can be used by athletic training educators to examine the amount of time students are actually engaged in specific domains of athletic training, to determine the domains in which skills are most commonly being performed, to identify the relationships between the students and clinical instructors or supervisors, and to develop clinical placements in which students learn and practice clinical and educational competencies.