Using Technology in Peer Role-Play Assignments to Enhance Competency in Clinical Dyadic Treatment: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Using easily accessible technology, I assessed Masters of Social Work students’ knowledge and competency in a course dedicated to clinical practice with dyads. Forty students completed the Dyadic Knowledge and Competency Scale before and after a video-recorded role-play assignment. Results of paired t-tests revealed significant improvement from pretest to posttest in knowledge and competency, and qualitative results punctuated role-play and feedback as important means to gain competency in clinical practice with dyads. I discuss implications for competency-based education, and the need for future studies with stronger designs and ongoing attention to technological considerations for using role-play to enhance competencies.

KEYWORDS:

• competency-based education
• multimedia
• role-play
• technology training

Notes

**p-value < .001.

YouTube has three privacy settings: public, unlisted, and private. Videos uploaded as “public” are searchable and easy for the public to access. Videos uploaded as “unlisted” can only be viewed by those who have a link to the video. Videos uploaded as “private” can only be viewed if the person uploading the video has “shared” the video with another YouTube user.

At the time of data collection for this study, YouTube did not allow videos to be uploaded that were longer than 15 min. Newer features in YouTube, however, allow for a longer video-recording limit.

Importantly, videos cannot be sent simply as an e-mail attachment, because each video is approximately 400–900 megabytes, which is far beyond the capacity of e-mail. Rather, the e-mail comes from a student's YouTube account, which provides the instructor a link. When the instructor receives the e-mail from the student, he logs into his YouTube account in another tab of his web browser, clicks on the link from the e-mail, and then is provided access to the video, so long as the student has properly entered the instructor's YouTube username as someone who can have access to the video.