Effectiveness of Paralleling Social Work Faculty Research in the Social Work Research Course Curriculum

Overview: Research is essential to student learning. It is important for social work faculty to not only teach research but demonstrate research processes to students. Many social work programs teach about research but lack faculty engagement in scholastic research. Paralleling faculty research while teaching influence student learning and sparks research interests.Proposal text:

Background: Over the years as a Social Work faculty teaching social work research methods courses students have expressed their dislike for the course. Many students struggle with understanding research concepts and the process of designing a research proposal (Cvancara, 2016). While teaching social work research courses it was realized that simply paralleling faculty’s current research projects in the curriculum and course lesson plans helps improve student learning and understanding of research concepts. Social work research deals with problems experienced by social workers and communities, in terms of the functions of social work in evidence based practices within community settings. Highlighting faculty research projects seems to give more clarity in students conceptualization of the research process. When faculty social work research projects are keenly examined within the classroom setting, it easily became a significantly impactful learning approach for students (Flores-Carter, 2022).

Aims: (1) to improve student learning outcomes and easily help them to grasp research concepts. The objectives are (2) to provide social work faculty with a foundational guide on how to use their current research projects to enhance student learning outcomes (3) to address concerns and issues related to teaching social work research courses (4) to help increase the number of students interested in engaging in social work research beyond the classroom.

Methods: Social work research students enrolled in faculty fall 2021 and spring 2022 courses will be ask to complete Likert scale satisfaction surveys assessing the effectiveness of integrating faculty’s current research projects into class lectures helps with understanding the research process and writing research proposals. Hypothesis: (1) Faculty hypothesize that students will find integration of faculty research projects into lectures to explain the research process effective in enhancing their understanding of the research process and writing research proposal. (2) Faculty hypothesize that students will become much more engaged and verbalized more understanding of research concepts when using faculty research projects as a guide for the research process.

Conclusion: Discussing and reviewing components of faculty’s current research projects and aligning it with course lessons during each lecture session appeared to help past students to fill in research gaps and write research proposals. Past polls in these specific targeted areas in previous research courses students indicated that faculty using research project as examples specifically with writing the research introduction, literature review, methodology design, results and discussions sections of student research papers were extremely helpful and made it much more easier for them to understand how to outline and write their research proposals.