Begging to Differ? Clinicians’ and academics’ views on desirable attributes for physiotherapy students on clinical placement

ABSTRACT

Transfer of physiotherapy education from a health service base to a university base has resulted in a period of dissonance and disorientation for both academic and clinical educators. This is reflected in dissatisfaction with the way students’ learning is assessed on clinical placement and its effect on the quality of students’ clinical education experience. This study used a triadic repertory grid procedure to reveal the perceptions of 20 university‐based academics and 20 clinical educators in practice placements as to the attributes of good clinical performance and bad clinical performance by undergraduate physiotherapy students. The data were subjected to factor analysis and content analysis. The results indicated that a similar broad range of assessment criteria was applied by both groups in the study, but from their individual bipolar constructs eight common dimensions were identified as being used to differentiate between students. However, there were differences in emphasis between academics and clinicians as to the relative importance of the eight dimensions. On further analysis using an unrelated t‐test, the eight dimensions were found to be consistently sensitive as discriminators of clinical performance (academics — p < 0.001; clinicians — p < 0.01). The implications of the findings are discussed with respect to the overall quality of students’ learning, the overt and covert messages being relayed to students about professional competence and the need for reliable systems of clinical assessment in an increasingly litigious health care environment.