ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog

Teaching someone a skill is not necessarily a difficult thing. Skills are concrete, task-like, discrete, and relatively well defined. I have always tried to avoid teaching my students skills because it is my opinion that they need so much more than skill (although sadly they clamor for skills more than they clamor for background knowledge and understanding). Instead, I try to help my students develop some degree of critical reasoning, problem solving ability, analytical capability, and appreciation. I believe that these attributes will carry them farther than will the mere acquisition of skills. This is a stretch for many of my students - these demands take them places where they have not really been challenged before. As a result I notice that their confidence is dramatically decreased when they are taken beyond the stages of rote memorization. Because certitude is important I do not accept questions when I have asked them for answers. "Are you asking me or are you telling me?&qu

I received my "certification" to administer and interpret the Sensory Integration and Praxis Tests in 1992. I believe that the test battery was published in 1989 so it was still fairly new at the time I was certified. At that time there was a certification examination that you had to pass. I don't know how psychometrically sound the SII program was - but they claimed that it was a certification program. SII never wanted me to 'recertify' though - which is a little scary. In the past twenty years the Sensory Integration and Praxis Tests have not been updated and there are no new norms. I have never heard of an occupational therapist talking about the Flynn Effect or heterosis so I don't know if anyone believed that there is a useful lifespan of an assessment tool. Some OTs still use the old Bruininks-Oseretsky test that has 25 year old norms - they just got around to updating those norms recently but I still see a lot of reports with the old test given. Persona