General Principles

• Our goal is for students to accrue a minimum of 90 clinical clock hours per semester. Overall, students must accrue a total minimum of 375 direct clinical clock hours to graduate from the program.

  • If students meet or exceed the 90 clinical clock hours before the end of the semester, they are still required to complete the placement in full, as indicated on the student/supervisor contract, to gain a meaningful and robust clinical experience.  

• A clinical clock hour as any form of active, clinical engagement with the client.  

  • The graduate student does not necessarily need to be independently providing services in order to count clinical clock hours. The following would also count towards a clinical clock hour: co-treating, taking a language sample, scoring along with SLP during the evaluations, or providing one subtest of an entire evaluation.  In each of these examples, the student could count the full clinical clock hour because some portion of the treatment or evaluation session the student was clinically engaged with the client/patient.

  • If you had more than one graduate student clinician assigned and working with groups of clients, there is a recent update to the clock hours accrual (as of January 1, 2023). Students may only count the time that they are in direct contact with the client/caregiver during that session. This applies to all methods of service delivery.

    • Example: 3 graduate students are present for a 1-hour treatment session. Student #1 provides 20 minutes of intervention, Student #2 provides 30 minutes of intervention, and Student #3 provides 10 minutes of intervention. While the total time equals 60 minutes, each student may only count the time that they were the active clinician during the session.

• Activities that do not count as a clinical clock hour:

  • Observations (not doing much directly with the client) 

  • Lesson planning/making materials for therapy

  • Clinical writing (IEPs, evaluation reports, progress reports, goal writing, SOAP notes, documentation).  Clinical writing is important to our field, so any opportunities to participate in clinical writing are certainly encouraged but can not count towards hours.

  • Students may not accrue clinical clock hours for attendance at meetings (including IEP meetings) unless the client is present, for clinical writing, nor for programming of AAC devices. While ASHA and Emerson recognize the value of these experiences, ASHA does not currently allow students to accrue hours for these tasks.

• Our goal is for students to participate in a minimum of two diagnostic evaluations per semester.

  • Students benefit from the opportunity to observe and administer diagnostic tests and participate in an evaluation while in a clinical placement. It is important for our students to obtain these types of clinical experiences as it provides them exposure to and practice (i.e., administration, scoring, interpreting results, identifying goals based on findings, etc.) with a variety of diagnostic tests. Feedback from students has been overwhelmingly positive when they are afforded these opportunities that support their learning and growth as clinicians. 

Clinical Clock Hours: Criteria and Examples