Annual of social work, Vol. 17 No. 2, 2010.
Original scientific paper
HOW TO DEFINE AND MEASURE STUDENTS' COMPETENCIES – VALIDATION OF THE PERCEIVED COMPETENCE FOR PSYCHOSOCIAL WORK SCALE
Aleksandra Huić
orcid.org/0000-0002-7818-487X
; Department of Psychology, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia
Neven Ricijaš
orcid.org/0000-0001-8107-8448
; Department of Behaviour Disorders, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia
Vanja Branica
orcid.org/0000-0001-5184-6645
; Faculty of Law, Depatment of Social work, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The modern approaches to defining and developing of individual professions are focused on determining general and specific competencies needed for successful performance of work-related tasks. The same applies to current study programmes which need to define learning outcomes, i.e. students' competencies within each of the offered courses and each educational cycle. The paper aims to define competencies in the context of psychosocial work, as a common element of professional activities of psychologists, social workers and social pedagogues as well to present the development and metric characteristics of the Perceived Competence for Psychosocial Work Scale applied to students in the mentioned fields. The participants of the research were 585 final-year psychology, social work and social pedagogy students, out of which 302 students studied within the so called old model of the study programme while 283 students of the undergraduate programme were studying in the framework of the so called Bologna model. The validation procedure of the Perceived Competence for Psychosocial Work Scale showed stable but different factorial structure depending on the study programme model as well as good metric characteristics. The connectivity patterns with other variables suggest a construct validity of the Scale. The research results support a discussion on real differences in the structure of students' competencies depending on the study programme model.
Keywords
competencies; psychosocial work; psychology; social work; social pedagogy
Hrčak ID:
58882
URI
Publication date:
20.9.2010.
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