TEACHING STRATEGIES FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF CLINICAL REASONING

A primary dim of occupational therapy education is to teach students h ow to think like practitioners, that is, how to engage in clinical rea soning. Since the early 1980s, occupational therapy clinical reasoning research has elucidated a language that describes the various types o f thinking therapists use in clinical practice, a language that has th e potential to make previously tacit thought processes accessible to c onscious examination and improvement. Occupational therapy educators c an use that language to make their teaching of clinical reasoning more explicit to students. This article examines occupational therapy teac hing methods using the language of clinical reasoning, categorizing th em by the types of clinical reasoning they promote. Current clinical r easoning language is reviewed, and teaching strategies to facilitate t he various types of clinical reasoning are described.