Building Analytic Capacity and Statistical Literacy Among Title IV-E MSW Students

Abstract

Building and sustaining effective child welfare practice requires an infrastructure of social work professionals trained to use data to identify target populations, connect interventions to outcomes, adapt practice to varying contexts and dynamic populations, and assess their own effectiveness. Increasingly, public agencies are implementing models of self-assessment in which administrative data are used to guide and continuously evaluate the implementation of programs and policies. The research curriculum described in the article was developed to provide Title IV-E and other students interested in public child welfare systems with hands-on opportunities to become experienced and “statistically literate” users of aggregated public child welfare data from California’s administrative child welfare system, attending to the often missing link between data/research and practice improvement.

Assessing Statistical Literacy Level of Postgraduate Education Research Students in Malaysian Research Universities

“…Both Wallman (1993) and Gal (2002) defined statistical literacy in the context of data consumers, not of those who engage directly in the empirical investigation of actual data. Their notion of statistical literacy has been used and adapted in many studies in the educational contexts such as Lery et al (2015), Martinez-dawson (2010), Sharma (2017), and Yotongyos et al (2015).…”

Child Welfare Research and Training

“…One component of the Cal-Child Welfare Leadership Training (Cal-CWLT) partnership involves an innovative, rigorous curriculum in which Master of Social Work (MSW) students with child welfare career interests are trained to analyze and interpret child welfare administrative data and to identify ways to use data to inform child welfare practice. With the opportunity to work with actual child welfare data, students develop skills to use data to inform practice before they enter the workplace (Lery, Putnam-Hornstein, Wiegmann, & King, 2015;Shaw, Lee, & Wulczyn, 2012).…”

Building an Evidence-Driven Child Welfare Workforce: A University–Agency Partnership

“…MSW research course work and agency internships often fail to provide opportunities for students to develop these skills, yet the field increasingly demands them. A research curriculum specific to child welfare addresses some of these gaps, relying on a publicly available source of administrative data to train MSW students in statistical literacy and practical data analysis (Lery, Putnam-Hornstein, Wiegmann, & King, 2015). …”

“…A child welfare–specific research course curriculum provides instruction on problem formulation, research design, data collection, and data analysis (Lery et al, 2015). (The full curriculum is available at http://calswec.berkeley.edu/specialized-practice-areas.)…”