Friday, 14 January 2005 - 10:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Evidence-Based Practice

Rethinking the Measurement of Practice Competency: Have We Got it Wrong?

Purpose: Social work educators in North America have continuously sought out theories and methods to capture the complexities of social work practice and articulate essential or core components of knowledge and skill. One promising approach has been Competency Based Evaluation which attempts to articulate skills and knowledge in discrete measurable terms. Despite the appeal of this approach, concerns have been expressed that CBE methods not only lack predictive validity, but also reduce practice to mechanistic procedures which inadequately account for critical reflection and judgment. In an attempt to redress these potential shortcomings of CBE methods, this research project sought to develop an in-depth understanding of field instructors’ assessment of student performance and the implicit criteria by which they judged student competence.

Method: This grounded-theory study elicited depictions of exemplary and problematic students from 19 experienced field instructors utilizing the long-interview method of data gathering. After the initial coding of interviews, data analysis followed an iterative process in which the research team reviewed the open coding reports, engaged in selective coding and developed a theoretical understanding of the dimensions underlying field instructors’ assessments of student performance. This theory was then challenged through re-engagement with and re-examining of the data. Member checking was used by presenting the emerging theoretical understanding to another group of field instructors in order to assess transferability and confirmability

Results: What emerged was a constellation of personal qualities and characteristics possessed by students that affected their approaches to learning, their interactions with others in the organization, their relationship with the field instructor and their ability to develop therapeutic alliances with clients. Skills traditionally measured by CBE were considered secondary. For exemplary students, it was assumed that students who did not have basic skills could acquire them. For problematic students, possessing these skills did not outweigh the deficits described in their motivation for learning and interactional patterns. This suggests that the traditional means for measuring competence using CBE models do not map well onto the way in which practicing social work experts describe student strengths and weaknesses and therefore may miss the essence of professional practice. That is, professional practice rests on the ability to differentially use skills based on a broader understanding of the social context in which discrete skills are required and an understanding of multiple outcomes of any given behaviour. This ability becomes the overarching theme within which all other skills are judged.

Implications: Educators must develop new models for assessment of student practice competence that capture the many dimensions of professional practice. These models must include the essential interviewing, assessment and intervention skills which are well defined in competency-based models and yet they must also account for underlying qualities such as interpersonal abilities and social acuity.

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