Even though the course content is directly applicable to students’ future careers, they are often more interested in receiving a “cookbook” version of the material, shying away from situations with gray areas that require their judgment. My goal in this course redesign, then, was to increase students’ ability to develop rehabilitation exercises for specific injury scenarios. I planned to accomplish this goal through the implementation of a scenario writing process. Ultimately, I wanted to use these scenarios to help students learn how to apply the theory they’ve learned in the lecture portion of the course to their clinical assignments, to help them discover when and when not to apply a certain theory.
| ImplementationAfter receiving student and clinical instructor feedback, and after implementing these suggestions into my Modalities course in Spring 2009, I know that students need fewer protocol assignments and more explicit instructions about what needs to be included in the assignments and what the most efficient formatting should be. These changes will help students write more effective protocols from the beginning, thus increasing their chances for improvement across the semester, and will help me to provide more effective feedback along the way.
| SummaryAn athletic training professor found that his students were struggling to apply the theory they learned during class to patients at their clinical observations. His gradual development of a scenario-based assignment sequence with explicitly outlined expectations led to an increase in student understanding of the principles at work in rehabilitation techniquess.
