Handbook for Assessment in Social Work Education

By Tobi Delong Hamilton and Kathryn Krase

We designed this text to take the guesswork out of the assessment process for social work educators in many roles-program directors, assessment coordinators, field directors, faculty, program staff-in social work education programs. We intend for this book to be helpful to those new to the role of assessment as well as to those with years of exp

• Language: English
• Publisher: SWEAP
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985620108

Book preview

Contents

1Introduction

2Assessment in Social Work Education

3Understanding the Requirements for Assessment Under EPAS 2015

4Guidelines for Setting Benchmarks

5Creating an Assessment Plan: Assessment and Measurement

6Designing and Implementing the Outcomes Assessment Report

7Implications for Social Work Education: The Future of Social Work Education Assessment

Appendix A

Appendix B

SWEAP Team Biographies

References

Glossary of Assessment Terms

1

Introduction

Welcome to the Handbook for Assessment in Social Work Education. When a social work program earns accreditation through the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), it is recognized for adhering to high educational standards designed to best prepare graduates for professional practice. Accreditation, and later reaffirmation of accreditation, is a complex, multistep process that involves program self-studies, site visits by accreditation specialists, and reviews by the Commission on Accreditation.

All social work program directors, field directors, faculty, and staff know the enormous effort they must put forth to gain accreditation or reaffirmation. Often, the most troublesome part of the accreditation or reaffirmation process is designing, implementing, and reporting on a program’s assessment procedures. If you’re facing the hurdle of reporting your program’s assessment process to CSWE for accreditation or reaffirmation, have no fear. The SWEAP team—and this book—are here to help!

Assessment in Social Work Education

Program assessment is critical to ensuring social work education maintains a high level of quality. The outcomes of the assessment process provide evidence that students can demonstrate a level of competence necessary to enter professional practice, which then confirms that social work programs are successfully achieving their goal of educating and graduating competent professionals. Social work programs, in turn, can use assessment outcomes to guide curriculum design for optimal student learning and program effectiveness.

The value in focusing on the overarching goal of program assessment cannot be stated strongly enough: failure to regularly, and accurately, assess educational programs degrades the quality of social work professionals, and ultimately respect for our profession. The tools used in program assessment are based on systematic inquiry, integrity, respect for people, the common good, and equity (American Evaluation Association, 2018) and are designed for use in a holistic evaluation of a social work program (CSWE, 2015a).

The real challenge of assessment, though, is in the details. Choosing tools and administering them; analyzing and then reporting the data. These are time-consuming steps, wrought with anxiety over whether you are making the right decisions. The Social Work Education Assessment Project (SWEAP) was born out of these concerns.

Each and every member of the SWEAP team fell into their active role in program assessment without planning or deliberation. We don’t know many social work assessment coordinators who entered academia with a plan to become the person who coordinates their social work program’s accreditation and reaffirmation assessment process. For many of us in assessment, we were singled out by our supervising faculty or administrators because we evidenced higher-level understanding of quantitative research and evaluation of student outcomes. For others of us, we were the most recent PhD graduate to enter a social work department and deemed It as everyone else ran away from the scene.

Both of these situations are unfortunate. When a social work assessment coordinator takes on responsibility for assessment without a plan, they, understandably, will be really nervous. They might feel like they don’t know what they’re doing. What if they do it wrong? Will the program lose accreditation if they mess this up? These are all normal reactions, but usually unfounded fears. Sometimes we think that if we attend the CSWE accreditation sessions at the Annual Program Meeting (APM) and the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors (BPD), it will make us feel better, when, in fact, these sessions often leave us with more questions or concerns than answers. Other people ask questions we don’t understand, we worry they must know more than we do. Actually, those people with difficult questions are usually just as confused, or even more confused, than you are.

What has helped all of us on the SWEAP team is to realize that accreditation/reaffirmation and associated assessment processes are not competitive. If you really think about it, CSWE has a vested interest in getting your program through the accreditation or reaffirmation process: The more accredited programs there are, the more money there is for CSWE. You simply have to make it through the process, even with hiccups along the way. We encourage you to find helpful, supportive peer groups. For many, that means working with SWEAP.

Social Work Education Assessment Project (SWEAP)

We formed the Social Work Education Assessment Project (SWEAP) in order to design standardized assessment tools for social work programs.[1] We currently offer six standardized surveys and instruments for use in social work program assessment, and we also provide support for the development and utilization of customized tools for individual programs.

We weren’t always called SWEAP. In the late 1980s, a group known as the Baccalaureate Education Assessment Project (BEAP) formed to create instruments for use in internally and externally driven outcomes assessment. The BEAP team, each member with a shared interest in the science and practice of program assessment, came together organically. In 2013, BEAP transitioned into SWEAP, reflecting the fact that the group’s instruments could be used for graduate as well as undergraduate social work programs. Over the past few decades, seventeen different social work educators, all with extensive assessment experience, have been part of the SWEAP team. The current team is made up of social work educators from a diverse sampling of undergraduate and graduate programs across the country. To read the biographies of the current SWEAP team members, visit our website: www.sweapinstruments.org.

More than five hundred social work programs have successfully used SWEAP instruments to support CSWE accreditation and reaffirmation. Tens of thousands of students have completed our instruments. Although we value our instruments highly, we recognize that they are not perfect (since no tool ever can be), nor can they meet the needs of all programs. We respect the informed choices for assessment that programs make for themselves.

We have learned a lot, collectively, through this process of supporting social work education with our standardized and custom assessment instruments. This book was conceived after many discussions with assessment coordinators, faculty, and directors about the need for a simple guide through the assessment process. Our hope is to be your partner and that you will use this book to guide you through social work program assessment.

This Handbook

We designed this text to take the guesswork out of the assessment process for social work educators in many roles—program directors, assessment coordinators, field directors, faculty, program staff—in social work education programs. We are social work professionals with nearly a century of combined experience in social work program assessment! We intend for this book to be helpful to those new to the role of assessment as well as to those with years of experience. We hope you find it a resource that provides thoughtful analysis and helpful suggestions.

Each chapter provides literature and discussion of an important topic relevant to social work program assessment. A workbook assignment at the end of each chapter is designed to help you conceptualize where you are in the accreditation/reaffirmation process and apply the knowledge and skills that you are developing through each step of the process.

This book includes examples of assessment-related materials for a fictional institution of higher education called Persistence College. We created the Persistence College materials as a composite of actual materials SWEAP team members actually used in the accreditation or reaffirmation process of one, or more, of our programs. The examples provide helpful context but are not meant merely for you to copy. It may be appropriate to borrow some language from this book (with proper citation), but it is vital that assessment coordinators write up their self-study materials in their own voice. The point of self-study reporting is for program administrators to be able to explain the rationale of what they wrote when they meet with the site visitor. Therefore, make sure you fully understand what you submit to CSWE so that you can verbalize that understanding to the site visitor.

In this book, we will walk you step by step through the process of designing your program’s assessment process. At the end, after completing the workbook examples, you will have put together your program’s assessment plan, and understand how to report your outcomes. We primarily use SWEAP instruments to help explain the assessment process but also use other non-SWEAP examples. Our goal is for this book to be valuable even to programs that choose not to use SWEAP instruments.

We appreciate the trepidation you may be feeling as you approach the assessment process.