Although physical therapy students need to be well prepared to integrate strategies to effect health-related behavior change into their clinical reasoning, educators lack knowledge regarding which factors contribute to such competence. This study’s aim was to investigate the degree to which knowledge, cognitive, psychological and contextual factors as well as curriculum orientation influences students’ clinical reasoning focused on behavior change.
151 physical therapy students in the final semester completed the web-based Reasoning 4 Change instrument (1). 61 students attended a physical therapy education program with a behavioral medicine approach. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used to investigate the degree to which curriculum orientation, self-rated knowledge, cognition, metacognition, attitudes, self-efficacy and contextual factors influence three outcomes of the clinical reasoning process, i.e., Input from Client, Functional Behavioral Analysis (FBA) and Strategies for Behavior Change (SBC).
37% of the total variance in Input from Client was explained by all variables (p<.001), except contextual factors. Cognitive and metacognitive factors and attitudes were most important. Attending a physical therapy program with a behavioral medicine curriculum orientation was the only variable in the model that explained FBA (adjusted R2=.04;p<.05) and SBC (adjusted R2=.04;p<.01).