OT-930Z: Occupational Therapy Scientific Inquiry and Research
This course promotes the occupational therapists’ advanced and enhanced scholarship skills including critiquing and evaluating research for professional decision making. Using scholarship knowledge for informing occupational therapy practice is a major learning outcome of this course. It includes a review and use of descriptive and inferential statistics for understanding critiquing and conducting valid research. Students will construct and execute search strategies using internet and database technologies to identify and locate best evidence for selected occupational therapy interventions. Students will demonstrate the ability to use the hierarchy of evidence and appraisal tools to screen and select articles based upon usefulness within professional practice settings. Developing and evaluating scholarly proposal(s), data collection, methodology, instrument psychometrics, data analysis, obtaining external funding, and demonstrating the steps of writing a systematic review of the literature (including the demonstration of critiquing the validity of research studies including designs and methodologies) are learning outcomes in this course. This course is offered exclusively online.