A primary aim of occupational therapy education is to teach students how to think like practitioners, that is, how to engage in clinical reasoning. Since the early 1980s, occupational therapy clinical reasoning research has elucidated a language that describes the various types of thinking therapists use in clinical practice, a language that has the potential to make previously tacit thought processes accessible to conscious examination and improvement. Occupational therapy educators can use that language to make their teaching of clinical reasoning more explicit to students. This article examines occupational therapy teaching methods using the language of clinical reasoning, categorizing them by the types of clinical reasoning they promote. Current clinical reasoning language is reviewed, and teaching strategies to facilitate the various types of clinical reasoning are described.

Occupational therapists have not yet successfully translated their values about client-therapist collaboration into a formal set of procedures for practice.

Although perceptual retraining has for many years been an accepted part of occupational therapy for adults with perceptual problems stemming from brain injury, few outcome studies on this type of treatment have been conducted. To assure high-quality, cost-effective rehabilitation programs for this population, occupational therapists need to do more research to (a) precisely define perceptual interventions and (b) determine the efficacy of different occupational therapy approaches to perceptual problems. This article offers guidance on the design of future studies to achieve the latter goal by exploring the current research on the effectiveness of perceptual remediation and offers suggestions for future research.

The results suggest that using a clinical reasoning thinking frame to organize clinical observations is an effective way to help entry-level occupational therapy students learn and apply clinical reasoning concepts.

Occupational therapists use both adaptive and remedial approaches to perceptual retraining in adults with head injury. This experimental treatment outcome study compared the effects of adaptive and remedial treatments for constructional deficits on meal preparation competence and on constructional abilities in adult men with head injury. Forty-five subjects, 18 to 52 years of age, in long-term rehabilitation programs were randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups. A remedial group (n = 22) received individual training with parquetry block assembly, and an adaptive group (n = 23) received individual training in food preparation activities. Both groups received training for three 30-min sessions per week for 6 weeks, in addition to their regular rehabilitation programs. Results of analyses of variance and paired t tests on perceptual and functional test scores showed task-specific learning in both groups and suggested that training in functional activities may be the better way to improve performance in such activities in this population.