The Competency Rating Scale: Assessing Students' Mastery of Competencies during COVID 19

Background and Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has seen many schools of social work change curriculum delivery, a challenge especially felt in field education and the measurement of student acquisition of social work core competencies. Providing guidance on this challenge, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) issued a statement on field education during the COVID-19 pandemic to include maximizing student safety, reducing the number of required field hours, and allowing remote field activity. Despite the necessity of these adaptations, it remains unclear whether students can sufficiently acquire social work core competencies through remote field education pedagogy. To address this gap, the Competency Rating Scale (CRS) was developed to measure core competency acquisition of social work students who participated in simulated field education learning labs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: The CRS includes 30 items that were drafted to reflect the 2015 CSWE’s Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) core competencies in social work education. Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert Scale (1=Strongly Disagree and 5=Strongly Agree). The CRS was administered to 94 social work students (both graduate and undergraduate) completing a simulated learning lab on mindfulness and its role in improving clinical judgment. An exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation was conducted to identify if the underlying constructs of the CRS matched the CSWE EPAS core competencies. Additionally, students’ acquisition of core competencies were assessed by generating an average CRS score at both pre- and post-simulated learning lab and conducting a paired sample t-test. Internal consistency reliability scores were calculated at both pre-simulation and post-simulation.

Results: The 30 items of the CRS loaded on six interpretable factors in the exploratory factor analysis, showing conceptual connection with the CSWE Core Competencies. Social work students’ self-assessed rating of core competencies significantly increased from an average pre-simulated learning lab CRS score of 3.82 (SD 0.38) to an average post-simulated learning lab CRS score of 4.11 (SD 0.39) (t [-8.74]=93, p<.001) with a medium effect size (Cohen’s d = -0.57). The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was 0.797, above the commonly recommended value of .6, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant (χ² (435) = 1315.43, p < .001). Cronbach’s alpha indicated strong reliability scores at both pre- (.89) and post- (.91) simulation learning lab.

Conclusions and Implications: Our findings suggest that the development of the CRS was effective in measuring social work students’ core competencies in simulated learning environments. Whether or not simulation labs are more effective or could be used to replace accrual of traditional field education hours remains debatable. However, the development of the CRS, at the very least, allows us to begin a conversation on ways to measure core competencies acquired through participation in simulation labs. Implications for the evolution of social work field education and its use of simulated learning environments will be discussed.