Effects of Micro Skills Training on Questioning, Explaining, and Reinforcement on the Clinical Instructors' Teaching Skills

Abstract

Background and Objective: The Philippine Physical Therapy Association (PPTA) had a program called the Clinical Supervisor Series (CSS), which had modules on program designing, instructional designing, and program evaluation. To uphold the PPTA's initiative for the capacity-building of Clinical Instructors (CIs) and to instruct them how to teach, this study determined and compared the perceived level of effectiveness and frequency of using questioning, explaining, and reinforcement among 15 Physical Therapy CIs before and after the Micro Skills Training on Questioning, Explaining, and Reinforcement (MST-QER).

Methodology: A quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest design was used. A combination of observation,
checklist, and interviews was conducted to determine how MST-QER affected the CIs' delivery skills.
Quantitative and qualitative analysis included Wilcoxon signed rank test, mean, mode, and percentage scoring and content analysis, respectively.

Results: Wilcoxon test (at p = 0.05) results revealed that the CIs improved in the effectiveness of questioning (0.033) and explaining (0.015) particularly in phrasing (0.007), promoting clarity, fluency and pacing (0.014), and using examples (0.014). The effectiveness of reinforcement yielded no significant differences (0.156). Reinforcement was already effectively used by 67% of the CIs during the pretest and the percentage of increase in the posttest was, therefore, no longer significant. As regards frequency in the use of the micro skills, the CIs improved only in the use of focusing in questioning (0.011) and activity reinforcement (0.011).

Conclusion: The analysis of the results showed that MST-QER improved the clinical instructors' effectiveness and frequency in using the micro skills of questioning, explaining, and reinforcement.