Assessing Conversational Skills in European Social Work Education

This study is about assessing conversational skills at four North-western European schools of Social Work. The goal of the research is to find out what skills are assessed and how this is done. Thereby the researcher studied the way the schools are working on increasing validity and reliability. Besides studying the way the schools assess the conversational skills, a survey was submitted towards examiners of conversational skills to measure their perception about the level of conversational skills their graduates do have. Included in the study were the following schools: Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen (HAN) (the Netherlands); Arteveldehogeschool Gent (Belgium); Metropolia University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Helsinki (Finland) en University of West London (UWL) (United Kingdom). The study is designed as a ethnographic collective casestudy where the focus laid on comparing the actual practice of assessing conversational skills at multiple universities (of applied sciences). By analyzing course documents, interviewing examiners at the different schools and a short survey, the questions are being answered.