Contract grading provides graduate-level students with greater control and autonomy within the learning process. The contract grading approach requires students to take greater responsibility for achieving course learning outcomes as well as allowing learners to adjust the style and focus of assignments to meet their own unique needs and desires.…

Given the increasing value placed on research among social work practitioners, and that field education is primarily responsible for the integration of social work values, knowledge, and practice, it is essential that research skills be incorporated into BSW and MSW field practica. In 2020, a team of faculty co-investigators and students explored…

This teaching initiative responded to an effort to strengthen the connection between cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) theory and practice among Master of Social Work (MSW) students. This initiative was developed in response to feedback from our MSW students, who requested further training in CBT skills before entering practicum settings.…

The ongoing emphasis on micro practice and declining interest in macro practice has raised concerns regarding the availability and quality of macro internships. Effective training of macro practitioners entering the field remains necessary for reasons including oversight of staff and student internships. This study examines student and faculty…

This study aims to systematically evaluate the scoring errors made by psychologists in training, in the hopes of providing strong, empirically based guidelines to training programs. Survival analysis was used to determine the number of attempts required for graduate students to achieve proficiency in scoring standardized record forms from the…

Mental illness is a substantive issue for graduate students. We investigated experiences of mental illness during training among genetic counseling students, a subgroup of graduate students for which little data exists on this topic. Genetic counseling students and recent graduates (n = 227) completed an online survey, from who 11 were selected to…

Classroom-based microaggressions are a critical problem, associated with a range of negative impacts for students in targeted groups. Central to the problem of microaggressions is that they are often unacknowledged or unaddressed by educators in their own classrooms. Findings from the Social Work Speaks Out! mixed-method survey demonstrate that…

Equipping future social workers to interrogate social justice, human rights, and cultural issues requires a revision of social work education. Culturally relevant teaching is increasingly important in today's globalized world. In this article, we explore the role of comics as a form of social work pedagogy to tackle complex social issues. The…

Discrimination toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social work students can negatively affect academic performance and personal and professional identity development. Intersectionality is a conceptual approach that states that social identities interact to form different meanings and experiences from those that could be…

Experiential learning opportunities are powerful in shaping positive supervisor behaviours. We were interested in examining the positive experiences of supervisors-in-training during their first practice experience as supervisors. Our study was guided by two research questions: (a) what are the experiences that supervisors-in-training viewed as…

The authors describe a for-credit course for Social Work PhD students called Writing for Publication and report on a study evaluating its success in supporting students to develop and submit a paper for publication in a refereed journal. The literature-informed course design, taught in collaboration with the university's Writing Centre, includes…

This project proposal designs an empirical based study to assess student and faculty satisfaction in graduate distance education counselling programs. The proposed study includes two satisfaction surveys and associated administrative protocols. The surveys were developed based on the Sloan Consortium definition of satisfaction (Moore, 2002; 2005)…

This study examined predictors of interest in the future provision of clinical services to people with developmental disabilities by Canadian graduate students in psychology. Utilizing a cross-sectional survey, 458 psychology students from clinical, clinical neuropsychology, and counseling psychology programs from across Canada provided…

The increased focus on the role of research in the social service sector, pressure for practitioners to engage in research and the demand for integration of research and practice challenges faculties about ways in which to engage social work students in research. This paper evaluates a research based practicum program within a social work faculty…

Uses 12 subscale scores on the Personal Orientation Inventory to assess effects of a practicum experience upon self-actualization of 79 University of Alberta graduate students (counseling students with and without practicum, and noncounseling students). Results indicate a facilitative effect of practicum upon self-actualization. (AH)