TDG – Development of Student Speech Therapist Writing Skills of Clinical Documents through Computer Supported Programmes

Abstract

Professional and technical clinical writing skills are unique professional training skills for student speech therapists to learn in their clinical education. However, due to limited contact hours of instructions in clinical education programme, clinical writing assignments have become a major challenge for many students.

This project aims at producing an interactive computer programme to train students’ professional and technical writing skills with increased amount of appropriate quick feedback generated by pre-set computer programme without having to put extra burden on instructors’ face-to-face teaching hours.

By using interactive computer programmes, previous good exemplars in clinical writing can be made available to students and students can have online feedback for their work. We have collected over years a rich resources of exemplar clinical documents that can be organized into different categories of clinical writing tasks. Templates of clinical reports can also help to ease students’ initial development of writing a professional standard work.

A total of 40 BSc (Speech and Hearing Sciences) undergraduate students participated in this project in a seven months time span. They were trained in two workshops to learn how to use the computer programme before trying out the 3-part training exercise.

An evaluation session was conducted at the end of their participation. Overall, the mean of response fell high between the rating of fair-satisfactory (3.7 on a 5-point scale).

Most students agreed that this method is an alternative in training them in writing diagnostic clinical reports, and helps them to revise key clinical knowledge.

The results show that computer aided feedback helps to train undergraduate students of BSc (Speech and Hearing Sciences) programme in their technical and professional writing skills. There are several advantages of using pre-programmed computer-aided feedback on teaching professional and technical writing skills at pre-clinical stage. The abundant, quick, appropriate feedback given to the students by the electronic programme reduce instructors’ face-to-face teaching, and enhance efficiency in teaching and learning.

Deliverables