Primary outcome – quality of CRs
The primary outcome was the differences between the two groups in the quality of production of a CR that contained the assessment and the treatment of a patient they saw during their placement. A literature search was conducted to look for a checklist to assess CR. Since no checklists were retrieved, an ad hoc checklist was developed following a similar strategy to the one reported by Rossettini et al. [The checklist comprised 16 items divided into two parts: a formal and a content one (6 in the formal part and 10 in the content part). Briefly, the former evaluated the presence or absence and the adequacy or inadequacy of some formal characteristics (font, heading, meeting the deadlines, syntactic form, appropriate language etc.) that needed to be present in the CR. The latter evaluated the contents of the CR based on the skills that the students were supposed to reach (patients’ assessment and treatment).The preliminary version of the checklist was then validated for face and content validity through a Delphi Procedure [GDB and LD then tested the final checklist to evaluate the CRs of 10 students not involved in the study. Thus, Cronbach’s alpha was calculated to estimate internal consistency, and the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was calculated to assess Inter-rater agreement. The internal consistency was adequate with Cronbach’s alpha α = 0.82 (95% confidence interval (CI) [0.56–0.94]). Inter-rater agreement was also high (ICC 0.96, 95% CI [0.85–0.99]).Finally, two blinded assessors used the checklist to evaluate the primary outcome. One had experience in speech therapy clinical practice for developmental age and assessed the 25 reports in that area, and one in speech therapy clinical practice for adulthood and corrected the remaining 25 reports focussed on adults. The evaluators were unaware of the study objectives and participants’ groups and were preliminarily trained using the checklist. The evaluators independently assessed the recorded performance. A comparison between the two groups was made based on the marks obtained. Moreover, upon completion of the data collection processes, feedback on the quality of the report was offered individually to all students in both groups.