Occupational Therapy Trivia
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97 free Occupational Therapy trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free occupational therapy trivia questions with answers. This occupational therapy trivia quiz is built for OT students, practitioners, OT Month celebrations and anyone curious about the profession. It covers the roots in moral treatment and the Arts and Crafts movement, the 1917 founding meeting at Consolation House and its six founders, Eleanor Clarke Slagle and William Rush Dunton, the reconstruction aides of World War I, Elizabeth Casson's first UK school, AOTA and the World Federation, the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework, ADLs versus IADLs, Sidney Katz and Lawton, Jean Ayres and sensory integration, the Model of Human Occupation, practice settings, degrees and the OTR credential. Early questions suit first-year students; later ones reward people who know which founder collected quilts and which psychiatrist gave the profession its philosophy in 1922. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which architect hosted the 1917 meeting that founded occupational therapy's first professional society at his Clifton Springs home?
George Barton
George Barton, disabled by tuberculosis and a frostbitten foot, had rebuilt his own health through work, then turned his house into a workshop where other convalescents could do the same.
Q 02What was the name of the Clifton Springs, New York house where occupational therapy's 1917 founding meeting was held?
Consolation House
Consolation House was designed as a school, workshop and vocational bureau for convalescents, so the founders met inside a working model of the therapy they had come to promote.
Q 03Susan Tracy, counted among occupational therapy's founders although she missed the 1917 meeting, had trained in which profession?
Nursing
Nursing showed Tracy that busy patients were happier than idle ones, so in 1906 she began teaching student nurses to use crafts at the bedside and in 1910 wrote a manual on it.
Q 04At which famous Chicago settlement did Slagle set up a workroom for people with disabilities?
Hull House
She was inspired to enter the field after visiting Kankakee State Hospital.
Q 05Where in Baltimore did Slagle organise an occupational therapy department in the 1910s?
The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic
The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic's director asked Slagle to organise occupation for patients, the post from which her career took off.
Q 06Occupational therapy founder William Rush Dunton was also a noted scholar and collector of what?
American quilts
American quilts served Dunton as therapy, since he had patients cut and sew bright cloth to take their minds off their troubles; the hobby put him in the Quilters Hall of Fame in 1979.
Q 07What name did Slagle give her round-the-clock programme for psychiatric patients?
Habit training
Habit training set a twenty-four-hour schedule that every member of the ward staff kept, rebuilding patients' lost daily routines, starting with personal hygiene.
Q 08What were the civilian women who used crafts and exercise to treat wounded US soldiers in World War I called?
Reconstruction aides
Reconstruction aides were civilians rather than soldiers, and the year-old founding society wrote the emergency course that prepared them to rebuild wounded men's function and spirits.
Q 09Which 18th-century reform of asylum care is a philosophical root of occupational therapy?
Moral treatment
Moral treatment began when Philippe Pinel in France and the Quaker William Tuke in York replaced restraint and neglect with work and exercise, the seed of therapy through occupation.
Q 10Which late-Victorian design movement, a reaction against factory production, shaped early occupational therapy?
Arts and Crafts
Arts and Crafts reformers such as William Morris argued that making things by hand was healthier than tending machines, so early therapists borrowed their workshop crafts as treatment.
Q 11Which Swiss-born psychiatrist set out occupational therapy's guiding philosophy in a widely cited 1922 paper?
Adolf Meyer
Adolf Meyer taught that how people spend their days shapes their mental health, and he hired Slagle to put the idea into daily practice on his own Baltimore wards.
Q 12Who founded the first school of occupational therapy in the UK, in Bristol in 1930?
Elizabeth Casson
Elizabeth Casson came home from a visit to the United States convinced Britain needed such training, borrowed £1,000 from her actor brother Lewis, and opened the school a year after her clinic.
Q 13Which Bristol clinic housed Britain's first school of occupational therapy from 1930?
Dorset House
Q 21In occupational therapy, what does the term 'sensory integration' describe?
The organization of an individual's senses for use
The organization of an individual's senses for use is the theory's founding definition, and the therapy built on it is aimed mostly at children, including many with autism.
Q 22Which theoretical approach is associated with Gary Kielhofner?
Model of Human Occupation
The Model of Human Occupation, which Kielhofner developed with Janice Burke, gave therapists practical assessment tools as well as a theory, so they could plan treatment and measure whether it worked.
Q 23What sits at the very centre of the Canadian Model of Occupational Performance?
Dorset House opened in 1929 as a residential clinic for women with mental disorders, and its founder paid for it herself for nearly two decades before handing it to a trust.
Q 14With which United Nations agency has the global federation of occupational therapists held official relations since 1959?
The World Health Organization
The World Health Organization admitted the federation only seven years after ten national associations founded it in Liverpool, and the tie is still reviewed and renewed every three years.
Q 15Occupational Therapy Month is held each April to coincide with which event run by the profession's American association?
Its annual conference
Its annual conference falls in spring, so in 1980 the association hung a month of public events on it, passing over the March anniversary of its own founding.
Q 16In occupational therapy, what does the word 'occupation' refer to?
Meaningful everyday activities
Meaningful everyday activities, from dressing to gardening, are what therapists call occupations, which is why they treat toddlers and retirees who have never held or no longer hold a job.
Q 17In OT shorthand, what does the acronym ADL stand for?
Activities of daily living
Activities of daily living work as a yardstick: clinicians count how many basic self-care tasks a person can manage alone to judge how much help they need.
Q 18Who originally proposed the concept of ADLs as a measure of how well older patients function?
Sidney Katz
Sidney Katz, a physician, built his index after tracking hip-fracture patients and finding that the most independent could all manage the same ladder of tasks, from bathing down to feeding.
Q 19Which of these tasks counts as an 'instrumental' ADL rather than a basic one?
Managing money
Managing money is one of eight instrumental tasks Lawton and Brody listed in 1969, skills like shopping and handling medication that are usually the first to slip when independence starts to fade.
Q 20Which occupational therapist developed sensory integration theory?
A. Jean Ayres
A. Jean Ayres developed the theory as a University of Southern California faculty member, then wrote standardized tests and invented therapy equipment so that others could put it into practice.
Spirituality
Spirituality sits at the heart of the Canadian model, and a 2007 revision widened it from performing occupations to engaging in them, adding Engagement to its name.
Q 24Which AOTA document sets out occupational therapy's domain and process?
The Occupational Therapy Practice Framework
The Occupational Therapy Practice Framework was adopted in 2002 to replace the older Uniform Terminology, and it reached its fourth edition in 2020.
Q 25Which of these settings employs the largest share of US occupational therapists?
Hospitals
Hospitals employed 30% of US occupational therapists in the 2021 federal figures and 26% in 2025, about twice the share in schools, though private therapy offices edged past them in 2025.
Q 26What entry-level degree do occupational therapists in the US need?
A master's or clinical doctorate
A master's or clinical doctorate has been the way in since 2007, after the profession voted in 1999 to close the bachelor's route into practice.
Q 27What does the credential OTR signify?
Occupational Therapist, Registered
Occupational Therapist, Registered echoes the profession's first national register of qualified therapists, published in 1932; today the title is earned by passing a national exam.
Q 28Which board administers the US national certification exam for occupational therapists?
NBCOT
NBCOT grew out of a separate board created in 1986, when the membership association, wary of antitrust trouble, gave up certifying its own members; ACOTE, by contrast, accredits the degree programmes.
Q 29Which of these crafts did America's first occupational therapy training standards, set in 1923, require students to learn?
Basket weaving
Basket weaving appeared in the 1923 standards beside woodwork, looms and jewellery making, and students owed at least 1,080 hours of handwork against a minimum of 75 hours of lectures.
Q 30In hippotherapy, which animal's movement do occupational therapists use as a treatment tool?
A horse
A horse's movement is the tool in hippotherapy: licensed therapists use its shifting gait to draw out a client's balance and posture responses, so the animal influences the rider rather than the reverse.