IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ELECTRONIC RUBRIC FOR THE EVALUATION OF PHYSIOTHERAPY STUDENTS’ CLINICAL PRACTICES IN THE PUBLIC HEALTH SETTING

Introduction:
In the Physiotherapy Degree, as in other Health Sciences degrees, the quality of the students´ training in clinical setting entails an appropriate evaluation process. By assessing competences, the achievement of the learning results previously established in the training project can be determined. In this process, physiotherapists acting as internship tutors are a keystone.
In the Physiotherapy Degree of the University of Valencia, students had to hand out a paper rubric to the internship tutors, who had to fill it in with the appropriate evaluation and send it back to the Faculty in a closed enveloped through students. Both agents are essential in the students' clinical competences acquisition and their coordination is needed.
But this process required almost 900 documents (and envelopes) per year and the results obtained by this way (competences evaluation) involved a very slow and complicated process.
In this context, this project aimed at updating and modernizing the way the internship tutors placed at public heath settings, evaluate the clinical competences acquired by third- and fourth-year Physiotherapy students, with a double objective: on the one hand, to facilitate the evaluation process and, on the other hand, to increase the link between them and the academic tutors.

Methods:
To reach this objective, an electronic rubric for the evaluation of the basic and specific competences of the subject Clinical Practices, was designed and implemented through the digital platform of surveys of the University of Valencia, during the academic year 2019-2020. The academic tutors sent this survey directly to a total of 60 internship tutors placed at the public health setting, thus involving the two agents who are essentials in integrating the students' competences (the clinical and the academic tutors). For the analysis of usability and satisfaction with the new instrument the System Usability Scale (SUS). In this scale, in a total punctuation of 100, scores > 80,3 mean excellent; 68-80,3 good; 68 is okay; 51-68 poor, and <51 awful. It allowed us to compare with the traditional model and thus evaluate the action carried out. The study was approved by the Humans Ethic Committee of the University of Valencia (register code: 1092949). This work was supported by an educational innovation grant of the Vicerectorat d’Ocupació i Programes Formatius of the University of Valencia (UV-SFPIE_PID19-1095896).

Results:
All of the 60 internship tutors, who belonged to 5 different hospitals and one primary care center, answered the survey [46 women, mean age 51 (SD, 7) years]. The total score of the SUS was 92.4 (over a scale of 100 points). The item that compared the satisfaction with the traditional paper rubric with the new e-rubric obtained a mean value of 4,83 over 5 (SD, 0,42).

Conclusions:
Internship tutors of the public health setting considered that the developed e-rubric is highly useful and they valued its usability very positively. They were also highly satisfied with its implementation in comparison with the traditional paper method. Moreover, from an academic viewpoint, this innovative process was very quick and easy.