NPTE Preparation Survey of Physical Therapy Students Across Pandemic Cohorts
by Singh, Bhupinder / Harvard Dataverse·Updated 5mo ago
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Description
Cross-sectional survey responses from 2,111 physical therapy students eligible for the National Physical Therapy Examination between 2017 and 2024. The data captures study behaviors, resource utilization, perceived difficulty, and self-reported exam scores, stratified into pre-pandemic, during-pandemic, and post-pandemic cohorts.
Use Cases
Analyze the relationship between self-reported study frequency and self-reported NPTE scaled scores across the three pandemic-era cohorts.
Compare perceived content-level preparation difficulty against the utilization of commercial review materials to identify resource gaps.
Model trends in preparation resource utilization (textbooks, commercial materials) over the seven-year period from 2017 to 2024.
Investigate differences in study location patterns between the pre-pandemic and during-pandemic cohorts.
Strengths
2,111 survey responses provide a substantial sample for cohort-level analysis.
Data is stratified into three distinct time-based cohorts (pre-pandemic, during-pandemic, post-pandemic) enabling temporal trend analysis.
Variables cover multiple dimensions of exam preparation including behaviors, resources, perceived difficulty, and performance outcomes.
Limitations
All data is self-reported, introducing potential recall or social desirability bias for variables like study frequency and exam scores.
The cross-sectional design captures trends across cohorts but cannot track individual student trajectories over time.
Variables are categorical or ordinal, limiting the granularity of statistical analysis compared to continuous data.
Provenance
Source
Harvard Dataverse, contributed by author Bhupinder Singh.
Collection Method
Electronically collected cross-sectional survey responses from eligible physical therapy students across the United States.
Time Range
2017 to 2024
Freshness
Data covers up to 2024 and was last updated in the repository on 2026-01-18.
Geography
United States
Dataset does not contain personal identifiers or institutional affiliations. All variables are categorical or ordinal. Specific column names and file formats are not provided in the input.