Should End-Measures for Every Competency and Practice Behavior Come from Field Practicum Evaluation?

Background CSWE defines social work requisite curriculum for baccalaureate and master's social work programs (hereinafter, "programs") through the EPAS (CSWE, 2008). The Council for Higher Education and Accreditation (CHEA) serves as the accrediting body for CSWE. EPAS guidelines must be satisfied in order for programs to maintain accreditation through CSWE and for CSWE to maintain accreditation with CHEA (Petracchi & Zastrow, 2010a). As a component of CSWE's accreditation, the EPAS must be reviewed and updated periodically; they are revised every seven years.The 2008 EPAS set significantly different standards from prior versions. Holloway (2008) points out that the 2008 EPAS mirror an emphasis on assessment of educational outcomes that has evolved in general education over the past ten years. He further notes that the 2008 EPAS replace the notion of assessing educational program objectives with that of assessing practice competencies which emphasize behavioral outcomes for professional social work education (Petracchi & Zastrow, 2010a, b). Holloway (2008) suggests that the emphasis shifts from "...what goes into education to a focus on what comes out" (p. 2).The 2008 EPAS outline the explicit curriculum in section two, and further specify core competencies in subsections 2.1.1 through 2.1.10d (CSWE, 2008, pp. 3-7). Within each subsection, the competency is identified and followed by an explanatory paragraph; it is then further outlined by bulleted points that have become generally known as practice behaviors. The whole of these criteria are often interchangeably referred to in social work education as "the 10 core competencies and 41 practice behaviors," "the competencies," or "the practice behaviors."This shift from evaluating educational objectives to practice competencies has been discussed among programs throughout the country for several years, and the process of determining how to effectively assess these competencies has resulted in significant confusion and debate. Petracchi and Zastrow (2010a), for example, required five pages of text and several tables to explain the complexity of designing syllabi with articulate learning objectives and outcome measures within the classroom curriculum.Section 2.3 of the 2008 EPAS defines field education as the signature pedagogy of social work education, stating that it is, "the central form of instruction and learning in which a profession socializes its students to perform the role of practitioner" (CSWE, 2008, p. 8). Further, "it is a basic precept of social work education that the two interrelated components of education - classroom and field - are of equal importance within the curriculum, and each contributes to the development of the requisite competencies of professional practice" (p. 9).This premise has required significant change within field education. Field directors have had to re-train experienced field instructors and prepare new field instructors to understand competencies and practice behaviors, train field instructors to use the learning plans in a way that produces outcome measures related to practice behaviors, and maintain field sites that offer adequate opportunities for students to engage in and demonstrate competence.Holloway (2008) suggests "...the experience of the COA (Commission on Accreditation) with assessment suggests that programs select two or three discrete measures for their assessment of each practice behavior comprising each student competency" (p. 11). It has been suggested that programs include one measure of each practice behavior from the classroom, one measure from field, and one from student self-evaluation (Holloway, 2008; Petracchi & Zastrow, 2010a). However, more recent debate has arisen regarding the inclusion of student self-assessment measures, questioning whether such measures warrant equal weight with classroom and field evaluations of performance. There have been suggestions that the COA is considering elimination of the student self-assessment as an option for end-measure outcomes, though a formal statement of such has not yet been issued. …