Revised goals:
Increase student independence in locating, evaluating, synthesizing, and applying current evidence in order to develop life-long learners.
Incorporate a greater emphasis on in-class application of evidence.
Revised student objectives: Students will demonstrate that they can:
Perform effective search strategies to locate relevant evidence;
Efficiently identify key information in the obtained sources;
Critically evaluate the evidence; and
Apply evidence to clinical cases.
Revised course activities:
I devoted a class session to a discussion of how to find research evidence and created a supporting handout ("Finding Clinical Evidence") with the help of Judith Emde, a KU librarian. For subsequent class sessions, students attempted to locate research articles on the topic being discussed in class. Students reported the search terms and databases they used and the number of relevant articles found via an online quiz prior to class. This gave students 12 attempts at locating research articles on topics related to treatment of children with phonological disorders.
I devoted a class session to instructing students on how to read and evaluate a research article with a supporting handout ("Evaluating Clinical Evidence") and walked them through a research article to demonstrate where to find key pieces of information (e.g., the paragraph before the methods section usually summarizes the experimental questions). Students used this framework when completing online reading quizzes prior to class discussions of the course articles. This gave students 12 attempts at understanding and evaluating a research article independently.
To help students compare and contrast the different treatment packages reviewed in the second half of the course, I developed a handout ("Treatment Components") to help students know what components to look for when reading about a given treatment.
I adapted three clinical cases from my research program and used these to demonstrate application of the research evidence during each class. For the first case I demonstrated how the research evidence would influence my approach to the case, and then students participated in a discussion of how the evidence could be applied to the remaining two cases. The three cases represented a range of difficulty from clear diagnosis of sound delay to less clear diagnosis of sound delay. Likewise, treatment options ranged from only a few valid treatment options to a variety of valid treatment options.
I adapted an additional 17 clinical cases from my research program for assessment purposes. These cases represented a range of difficulty from clear diagnosis of sound delay to less clear diagnosis of sound delay. Likewise, treatment options ranged from only a few valid treatment options to a variety of valid treatment options.
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