Moving Toward Participation-Focused Goals for Students With Disabilities: Outcomes of a Knowledge Translation Program for School-Based Therapists.

There was no comparison group. The same therapists wrote goals before and after the training, so the shift could come from the training, from being asked to write a participation goal as part of the course, or from the therapists who were already working this way; the authors say the size of the change should be read with that in mind. The training bundled the PREP framework together with goal-writing practice, so it is impossible to tell which part produced the change. The person coding the goals knew whether each goal came from the first or the fifth session and coded on her own, arriving at decisions by discussion rather than by two people coding independently, and the authors call the coding scheme preliminary. The seven criteria were built by the authors from earlier research and were not tested by a wider panel of experts. Because goals were written inside a training course, it is unclear whether therapists actually used this kind of goal with students afterwards, or whether the change lasted. No child outcome was measured in this study. Most participants were occupational therapists, so the findings may mainly reflect their perspective rather than that of physiotherapists, speech-language pathologists and other school staff. The goals reflect the Israeli education system's own paperwork and the Ministry of Education course, so therapists elsewhere may find their goal formats differ. The therapists who did not hand in goals at one of the time points gave no recorded reason, so it is not known why 135 goals were available at the first session and 95 at the fifth.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest and, under funding, state that they have nothing to report. The four training programmes were offered by the Israeli Ministry of Education as a professional development course, and the Chief Scientist of that ministry approved the study.

Therapists' goals changed, but no child outcome was measured in this study, so do not read it as proof that the training improved students' participation. There was also no comparison group, so the shift may reflect which therapists chose to take the course or simply that they wrote the kind of goal the course asked for.