Critical Issues in Social Work Education.
Abstract The following critical issues facing social work education are reviewed: lack of an instructional methodology, effectiveness of practice, admissions to social work education programs, theories of people, assessment of competence, and generic curriculum. Possible avenues to effective education for practice are elaborated: relationship-building training, empirical bases of interpersonal helping, degree correspondence, and research on the instructional process. Where relevant, prototypes of effective training procedures and requisites are discussed briefly.
Objective measurement of the independent variable: A neglected methodological aspect in community-based behavioral research
The importance of adequately measuring independent as well as dependent variables in studies evaluating therapeutic services provided to antisocial children is indicated. Data were obtained from a study in which 139 antisocial children were stratified according to age and then randomly placed into 14 groups. The children were randomly assigned to either of 2 treatment strategies or to a control treatment strategy. The effect of the treatments was evaluated by 2 pre-post selfrating scales, by a prepost inventory completed by therapists, and by behavioral observations of both children and their therapists. Measurements of the children's and therapists' behaviors were secured at each weekly 2-hr, meeting for approximately 30 weeks. Very few significant differences occurred between the treatment and control groups on the dependent variables. The findings indicated that independent checks are necessary to insure that therapeutic strategies are actually being implemented, thus providing for an adequate test of their effects on the dependent variables.
WebPresent: a World Wide Web-based telepresentation tool for physicians
In this paper, we present the design architecture and the implementation status of WebPresent - a world wide web based tele-presentation tool. This tool allows a physician to use a conference server workstation and make a presentation of patient cases to a geographically distributed audience. The audience consists of other physicians collaborating on patients' health care management and physicians participating in continuing medical education. These physicians are at several locations with networks of different bandwidth and capabilities connecting them. Audiences also receive the patient case information on different computers ranging form high-end display workstations to laptops with low-resolution displays. WebPresent is a scalable networked multimedia tool which supports the presentation of hypertext, images, audio, video, and a white-board to remote physicians with hospital Intranet access. WebPresent allows the audience to receive customized information. The data received can differ in resolution and bandwidth, depending on the availability of resources such as display resolution and network bandwidth.