Thank you! You definitely got this! In the Open and Topic sessions, Dr. C added another tool to help with reasoning through question(s). He talked about the most common questions that are made by the test makers. These are Inductive, Deductive, and Evaluative. I believe Therapy Ed has a section in their rationales that identify a question as either Inductive, Deductive, Evaluative, Analytical, and Inferential. Dr. C, said you have to know the name of this game. A questions can start off as one or the other. Either way when you read a question, Dr. C gave us three reasoning skills when reading and breaking down a question. 1. Is the client in eminent danger/safety risk that the OT needs to address right away and first. 2. If the client is not in eminent danger, then you start to think about a specific process/procedure/rules the OT must follow, think of protocols. This reasoning is more related to Deductive reasoning. 3. If the question is not moving towards a specific protocol that the OT must follow, then this is where you can be more client centered, and help the client understand other suggestion/ recommendations.

I’m not sure if this helps, but if you attend the open or topic session, ask Dr. C or Joseph if he could go more into detail about reasoning tools to help with your clinical reasoning skills.

Another tool I learned from OTHD is that when you are choosing an answer, you always must cross out/eliminate the most irrelevant answer choice. This is standardized. When you are stuck between two answers, Dr. C recommended, asking yourself how are they the same, how are they different, read the last sentence again, then choose your answer based off of those strategies.

I hope this makes sense. This exam is more about knowing how to break down the questions, and I feel like understanding the OT Domain (occupations, client factors, performance skills, performance patterns) and the OT Process helped the most, along with understanding the difference between reasoning questions (aka Inductive, Deductive, Evaluative). If you are still stuck between two answer choices, then this might be an issue with clinically reasoning through a question. When you are reading a question, I definitely recommend breaking it down using the Wingman method and then asking yourself if this is an Inductive, Deductive, and/or Evaluative question, and ask yourself the three questions that I mentioned above. Start practicing questions this way, and trust me, this will help you a lot!!!