The fieldwork profile: a statistics assignment linked to the real world of occupational therapy students

SUMMARY New accreditation standards state that an entry-level occupational therapist who graduates from an accredited program should be an effective research consumer and should possess basic skills as a researcher. Some of these basic skills include being able to organize, collect, and analyze data to evaluate practice outcomes and being able to understand, use, and interpret statistics, specifically those which are descriptive, correlational, and inferential. Facilitating the development of these skills requires innovative and meaningful research assignments during occupational therapy education. The purpose of this article is to describe an applied statistics assignment based on the premise of learning-by-doing. The assignment is known as the "fieldwork profile analysis" and provides students an opportunity to connect their field-work experiences to their research class. Students responded positively to the assignment and indicated that their active involvement doing statistics facilitated their learning.