At this year’s 6th Annual Occupational Therapy Summit of Scholars, held in Boston MA in June 2017, first year Rehabilitation Science PhD student, Shabnam Medhizadah, won third place in the national student poster competition. Her poster entitled “Constructing and Validating the Short Form Fitness-to-Drive Screening Measure” focused on the development of the 32-item short form Fitness-to-Drive Screening Measure that identifies at-risk older drivers using caregiver responses. Exploratory factor analysis and classical test theory techniques were used to reduce the number of items in the tool from 54 to 32. Pearson’s r and receiver operating characteristics curve results indicated the tool had good predictive validity, indicating the tool could discriminate between drivers that passed or failed the on-road assessment better than chance.
Shabnam’s mentors on this project were Dr. Sherrilene Classen, her primary PhD mentor, and Dr. Andrew Johnson from the University of Western Ontario.
Great work Shabnam!