On the learning journey: what helps and hinders the development of social work students’ core pre-placement skills?

Abstract

The development and assessment of core skills, including communication skills, are essential prerequisites before social work students are judged ready for practice placement. This paper presents qualitative data from the first year of a three-year study of an undergraduate module taught jointly to undergraduate and postgraduate students on two qualifying programmes at a university in England. The study considers the impact of video recording in a ‘skills laboratory’ on social work students’ skills development, and compares this with other feedback mechanisms at the pre-placement ‘Readiness for Direct Practice’ threshold for the different student groups. Responses from 88 students to two questions on factors they identified as the most helpful/least useful for core skills development were collected, using the same questionnaire at three stages of the module. These were analysed using a grounded theory approach. A separate, quantitative analysis showed that assessment outcomes for undergraduate and postgraduate students were not statistically different. In contrast, this qualitative analysis showed that while there was common value for students from self-observation using video, there were key differences in learning preferences between undergraduates and postgraduates in relation to feedback. While undergraduates valued peer support in group work, postgraduates preferred feedback from authoritative, independent and credible sources.

Keywords:

• Communication skills
• self-observation
• readiness for direct practice
• higher education
• skills laboratories
• video
• feedback

Acknowledgements

The research project team would like to thank all those students, academic staff, technicians, practice educators and service users and carers who participated in the module and contributed data for this evaluation. We would also like to thank participants and the School and Faculty Research Conference workshops for their views, which contributed to the learning from this project.