This post is provided by guest blogger, Tricia Padgurskis, graduate student at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, MS in Training and Development program.

Should physical therapy students learn from live or multimedia demonstrations of manual therapy techniques?  Do you think multimedia instruction is sufficient for your physical therapist to learn to work on your injuries?

In the peer-reviewed, Educational Research Journal, Ivey and Parrish (2021) report the results of a live versus multimedia instruction of physical therapy students. Typically, physical therapy students need to be evaluated in the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains to properly perform orthopedic patient assessments. In this study, physical therapy students were evaluated on their psychomotor skills of patient upper and lower extremity manual assessment (Ivey & Parrish 2021). Two cohorts of students were either assigned to a live instruction or multimedia instruction with video group on these orthopedic techniques.  Interestingly, the two cohorts did not have a significant difference in skill performance. 

Does this mean that multimedia instruction is efficient enough to teach physical therapists?  Is skill level considered? Does the quality of media impact learning? To learn more, read this well researched article of instruction methods in physical therapy student psychomotor performance outcomes.

Ivey, C. J., & Parrish, A. A. (2022). Comparison of live demonstration versus multimedia instruction for

psychomotor skill development in physical therapy students. Educational Research: Theory and

Practice, 33(3), 35-46. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1366421.pdf