Mapping and Visualizing the Social Work Curriculum

Abstract

This is a methodological article describing how a national social work education research project constructed a taxonomy of educational terms and used database and data visualization software to map the social work curriculum in New Zealand. Mapping the curriculum is difficult enough in the context of a single educational program, however, representing and exploring curriculum topics across the 14 different educational institutions participating in this study presented formidable difficulties. This article explores the approach to curriculum mapping used by the research team and discusses the technologies and information science principles used to classify, map, and visualize curriculum content. It will explain how the researchers constructed a taxonomy of over 600 educational terms, describe how the taxonomy was used to index 402 curriculum documents in a relational database, and illustrate the creation of curriculum visualizations using the Tableau™ data visualization software. The way in which findings from this part of the study will inform subsequent phases of the research will be discussed. The strengths and limitations of the methodology will be noted and opportunities to use the assets created by the project for future endeavors identified.

Keywords:

• Curriculum mapping
• data visualization
• educational taxonomies

Notes

Notes

1 A wānanga is a tertiary education institution practicing teaching and research that advances Māori knowledge, traditions, and customs.

2 TemaTres is an open source vocabulary server web application used to manage and exploit vocabularies, thesauri, taxonomies, and other formal representations of knowledge. http://www.vocabularyserver.com/

3 More information on the NZQA educational levels can be found here: https://www.nzqa.govt.nz/studying-in-new-zealand/understand-nz-quals/

4 More information on the SWRB core competence standards can be found here: http://swrb.govt.nz/for-social-workers/competence-assessment/core-competence-standards/

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this project was provided by the Ako Aotearoa National Project Fund.