SKILL DEVELOPMENT USING THE NESTED MODEL OF CURRICULUM INTEGRATION IN THE CONDUCT OF PART-TIME CLINICAL EDUCATION. Ronald D. Barredo* Physical Therapist Assistant and Massage Therapy Programs, Kaskaskia College, Centralia, IL UNIQUE: The Nested Model of curriculum integration targets multiple skills in the conduct of the course and the delivery of course content. These skills include a social skill, a thinking skill, and a content-specific skill. PURPOSE: The purpose of the study was to determine the efficacy of the Nested Model of curriculum integration in developing communication, problem-solving, and case-related skills among physical therapist assistant students during their part-time clinical education. FOUNDATION: Integrating a social skill, a thinking skill, and a content-specific skill in the conduct of part-time clinical education allows the students to demonstrate the appropriate knowledge, skills, and attitudes during therapist-patient interactions. By structuring the clinical education experience around the nested skills, students are able to develop and be assessed in the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains. DESCRIPTION: The program faculty engaged in a three-phase action research design to address the purpose of the study. The first phase involved brainstorming and open coding of the requisite skills that the program faculty believed were important in the part-time clinical education experience. Toward this end, the program faculty identified the following three skills: communication skills (the social skill), problem-solving skills (the thinking skill), and case-related skills (the content-specific skill). The second phase involved the use of the Nested Model of curriculum integration in order to embed the identified skills during patient-therapist interactions. The third phase involved the development of structured experiences using clinical cases and standardized patients that required the students to perform the identified skills while being assessed by the instructor, their peers, and the students themselves OBSERVATIONS: The use of the Nested Model of curriculum integration yielded multiple benefits to the skill development of physical therapist assistant students in their part-time clinical education experience. First, there was increased faculty engagement in the teaching and learning process, especially in the development of clinical cases that highlighted the fundamental skills. Second, there was appreciable improvement in the performance of the skills, in part because of the clinical education experience, and in part because of the focus afforded by the structured clinical cases and standardized patients. Third, there was greater awareness among the program faculty of the utility and efficacy of the Nested Model of curriculum integration in achieving multiple skill development prior to full-time clinical education. CONCLUSIONS: This study underscored the importance of and need for pedagogically, clinically, and curricularly sound framework for clinical skill development among physical therapist assistant students. Future research may well consider the applicability of the study in professional physical therapist education. FUNDING SOURCE: None KEYWORDS: clinical education, nested model, curriculum integration Copyright 2009 by the American Physical Therapy Association. Requests for reprints should be directed to the corresponding author of the article. Educators, students, and other academic customers may receive permission to reprint copyrighted material from Physical Therapy (ISSN 1538-6724) by contacting the Copyright Clearance Center Inc, 222 Rosewood Dr, Danvers, MA 01923. Other types of customers who want permission to reprint should contact the APTA Editorial Office, Attn: Physical Therapy.