Evidenced Based Practice Assignment

EBP Assignment Information for Clinical Supervisors 

The Evidence Based Practice Assignment is the student's semester long project, while they participate in each of their four clinical placements.  It is typically due at the end of Week 11 of the academic term. It is the student's responsibility to make sure they are meeting EBP project requirements and deadlines. For more information about your mentorship role in this project, please read below or  refer to the document here.

HOW DO STUDENTS BEGIN THEIR EBP ASSIGNMENT? 

Once the student gets acclimated to the site and clients they will be working with, they should identify a client or group of clients they have a clinical question about- for example, they may want to investigate the efficacy of a certain treatment approach with a client given their diagnosis.

WHAT ARE THE REQUIREMENTS FOR CHOOSING AN EBP ARTICLE?

The student must find an investigatory research article that has been published within the last 10 years to be considered current.

a) The article needs to be a primary research study that includes participants. The student uses the evidence found within the article with either a similar population or similar clinical question in mind and will actively try to implement the evidence. The article CANNOT be a tutorial, systematic review, meta-analysis or book chapters. **Only primary investigatory articles published in a peer reviewed journal will be accepted for this assignment.**

b) Students have access to their program advisors and research librarians at the college if they are struggling with finding an article that meets their needs. We also provide them with a shared space to work through their questions, article selection processes and other quandaries with guided feedback from their peers and program advisors.

HOW DO STUDENTS USE THE EBP ARTICLE FOR THEIR ASSIGNMENT? 

Once the student has identified an article that meets the requirements for the EBP assignment, they share the article with you, read it themselves and discuss how to best implement outcomes from the research with their client(s) over the course of several sessions/weeks and collect data on the outcomes.

WHAT STUDENTS DO WITH THE DATA COLLECTED DURING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE RESEARCH? 

The student writes a short paper providing details of the implementation of the research, baseline measures, post treatment outcomes and any other considerations that might be worthy of noting. The paper is highly focused on processes and reflection (ie. it is ok if their implementation was ‘unsuccessful’ for any number of reasons including attrition, scheduling and any number of situations), the student’s job is to analyze the process in order to set them up to be successful EBP SLPs once they graduate.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE SUPERVISOR DURING THIS EBP ASSIGNMENT? 

Supervisors can and should provide guidance/suggestions for topic ideas, as well as serve as a mentor to provide feedback about implementation of the research. This might be a nice opportunity for both students and supervisors to learn about something new in the literature or for a student to dive deeper into a treatment approach a supervisor is using.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE STUDENT WRITES THEIR EBP PAPER? 

The supervisor is asked to sign the EBP paper (or article) to indicate that the student collaborated with the supervisor on the assignment and implemented the research from the article. At the end of the semester, students meet with their programadvisor to discuss their research article, implementation of the research and the client(s) outcomes.