Abstract:

Introduction:
The acquisition of scientific skills is a crucial aspect to incorporate evidence-based practice in the work routine of occupational therapy (OT) professionals. Although OT academic program of the bachelor/master’s degree in Spain includes scientific skills training, the reality is that OT students have difficulties to read, discuss, and critically appraise scientific literature. Journal Clubs are considered adequate teaching/learning resources used in both the clinical and academic settings that provide an open forum to discuss current best practices based on the latest information from scientific articles. Hence, we organized a Journal Club program for the OT bachelor/master’s degree at Miguel Hernández University. In this work, we examined the level of satisfaction and motivation for attending a Journal Club in students who participated in this innovation educational research program.

Methods:
This experience was performed with 9 voluntary OT students at Miguel Hernández University (6 bachelor students and 3 master students) during the 2019/2020 academic year. The teaching strategy was based on the Journal Club Toolkit by the American Occupational Therapy Association. All the participants attended three journal club sessions of 90 minutes. The selected articles for the Journal Club were: a systematic review and meta-analysis (first session), a clinical trial (second session) and a validation study of a scale (third session). A week in advance, the students received an email with all the information and materials required to prepare each session. All the sessions were conducted online using Google Meet. An example of one session is available on the following video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12QMFS43nB9xKRJAbHXg00-Q5aLq99G5c/view?usp=sharing. To assess the level of satisfaction and motivation, the students completed a questionnaire with open and closed questions (available at https://forms.gle/xtnv3eJYYhCe8vFG7). At the end of the Journal Club, the students had to make a critical appraisal of one selected article in a written report (an example of the report is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gLDpBdOuGD-WPvmjLOMLpT16SXpypPx9r9i19YbbrAQ/edit?usp=sharing).

Results:
The students reported that they were very satisfied with the Journal Club program; the average score of global satisfaction was 4.8 out of 5. The students declared themselves less satisfied with making a critical appraisal in a report (an average score of 4.4 out of 5) and more satisfied with the teachers of the program (an average of 5 out of 5). As a measure of motivation, we asked students about if they would recommend other students to participate in a Journal Club program, as well as about theirs reasons for recommendation. The 100% of the students reported the they would recommend other students to attend a journal club. The main reason was that a Journal Club was found a good support for the acquisition or strengthen of scientific skills (e.g. identification type of manuscript and methodological problems, critical thinking, and generalization of the results) to incorporate evidence-based practice. Conclusions: The students reported that they were very satisfied with this Journal Club program and that they would recommend other students to participate in this activity to improve their scientific skills in order to promote an evidence-based OT practice. Funding: PIEU/2019/49

Keywords:

Journal Club, occupational therapy teaching, scientific skills, evidence-based practice, satisfaction and motivation.