Social work students’ feedback about students’ suitability for field education and the profession

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Many students successfully complete placement, while, for a minority of students, placement may be a time when questions are asked about suitability for placement and professional practice.METHOD: Research undertaken with final year social work students examined their ideas about suitability and unsuitability for field education and practice and presented them with a model developed with field educators in an earlier phase of the research. The aim of the study was to incorporate students’ understanding into the discourse of suitability/unsuitability to further develop a suitability/unsuitability model for collaborative discussions between students, educators and supervisors. Twenty-eight students responded to an online survey.RESULTS: The results show that students identify a critical understanding of self, skills, knowledge, attitudes and contextual factors as important in assessing students’ suitability for field education. Identified indicators of unsuitability included lack of preparedness to learn, lack of capacityto demonstrate an understanding of professional values and ethics and inability to maintain professional boundaries or demonstrate basic practice skills. Students overwhelmingly supported the use of the presented model and made suggestions for further development of the model.IMPLICATIONS: The discussion emphasises the importance of using a pedagogically informed formative assessment strategy in a timely manner to address professional suitability with students.

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“…Social work practitioners can only be licensed in the United States if they have the necessary knowledge to pass licensure exams (Thyer, 2011;Croaker et al, 2017;Zuchowski et al, 2019). When social work faculty fail to expect and encourage learning, students suffer.…”

Can the Business-Oriented Higher Education Environment Compromise the Ethics of Social Work Education? An Exploratory Study of Faculty Perceptions

“…Social work practitioners can only be licensed in the United States if they have the necessary knowledge to pass licensure exams (Thyer, 2011;Croaker et al, 2017;Zuchowski et al, 2019). When social work faculty fail to expect and encourage learning, students suffer.…”

Changing practices of Suitability Assessment in a Norwegian Education Dental Programme

“…While individual educators may manage SA well, there is often a lack of a shared literacy/ understanding on how to make SA a formative process throughout an educational journey (Zuchowski et al, 2019;Dawson et al, 2017;Garner, Freeman, & Lee, 2016). Research also indicates that changing SA practices suffer from inarticulacy of what to evaluate and how to evaluate suitable performance, and there is commonly an absence of dialogue between the professional field and pre-service education (Bradley, 2013;Zijlstra-Shaw, Robinson, & Roberts, 2011).…”

“…Most SA in health professions is limited to the part of clinical practice or field work introduced in the late semesters, and there is less, or often no, engagement with SA in the early semesters (Finch & Poletti, 2013). Research additionally points to the fact that students are rarely involved in developing the practice of SA (Zuchowski et al, 2019). From these perspectives, changing SA practices requires an acceptance of its complexity, and the need to invest in both structural and cultural work and academic development over time (Stensaker, 2018).…”