Social work practicum students experiences, challenges, and aspirations during the COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Field education is considered the signature pedagogy of social work education, yet there are numerous challenges including a shortage of field instructors and available placements and barriers to advancing equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), which were heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. This articles shares the results of research designed to investigate practicum students’ experiences, challenges, and aspirations during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to answer the question: how did students’ experiences, challenges, needs, and aspirations vary due to their identity factors (e.g., gender and ethnicity), post-secondary institution (e.g., universities), and placement types (e.g., clinical/research)? To this end, a cross-sectional web-based survey was conducted to document the perspectives of BSW/MSW practicum students in Canada, with both open and close-ended questions. This article presents the survey results to two open-ended questions in three broad themes, namely mental health and wellness, students’ perception on field learning, and professional readiness. Female students across different ethnic groups reported challenges in balancing their gendered roles and responsibilities in caregiving and as a practicum student, which consequently impacted their mental health and wellness. Two major factors shaped practicum student learning, such as post-secondary institution (e.g., universities) and types of placements. Due to the pandemic, practicum students were unable to gain direct practice experience in person in their placement, which affected their perception of professional readiness. This article concludes that through an evidence-informed institutional and programmatic response and support, diverse challenges, needs, and aspirations of practicum students could be addressed to promote EDI in field education in the context of pandemics, emergencies, and disasters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".