Student Competency Assessment Essay

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Student competency assessment in CBE Assessment in CBE. In social work education, assessment of student practice is pivotal to student progress. The assessment refers to what values, knowledge, and skills which students acquire and how they apply them in their practice settings, such as a community (Cowburn, Nelson, & Williams, 2000). As CBE becomes a trend in higher social work education currently (CSWE, 2012; Damron-Rodriguez, 2008; O’Hagan, 2007; Phillips, 2011), assessment of student competencies has attracted more attention from educators for reasons (Baartman et al., 2007a; Baartman et al., 2007b; Baartman et al., 2006; Dochy & McDowell, 1997; Dochy et al., 1999). First, CBE is built upon cognitive learning theories and adult learning …show more content…

In the past, traditional assessment places more responsibility of assessment on instructors (Galambos & Greene, 2006). Some traditional formats of student evaluation, such as student report of field placement performance, are mostly assessed by instructors (Galambos & Greene, 2006). However, since the assessment culture became dominant in higher education, students were expected to share responsibilities in their learning process through a combination of different assessment forms, including self-reflection and self-assessment (Baartman et al., 2007; Dochy & McDowell, …show more content…

Social work students often use a self-administrated/self-scored questionnaire to assess their progress over times (Cartney, 2010). Most frequently, students are asked to assess their own competencies at two time points, prior and after a course (pre-test and post-test training measurement, Cartney, 2010; Damron-Rodriguez, 2008). This two time-point measurement, however, may expose a limitation when students tend to underrate their competencies in the pre-test and overrate them in the post-test (Cartney, 2010). This issue leads to an interesting question of how student self-assessments change across three time-point tests. To be more specific, if at the end of a course, students are asked to look back over the beginning of the course and rate their competencies at that time (retrospect test), whether or not their rates may change comparing to the pre-test rates. There is, however, a gap in the literature regarding this measurement. Our study addresses this gap through three time-point measurement (pre-test, post-test, retrospect test) of student self-assessment of their progress on the core competencies in the SWCO

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