Technical specifications for the North Carolina Child Welfare Pre-service Training Curriculum Test of General Knowledge

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services Division of Social Services (DSS) conducts approximately 48 pre-service training classes throughout the year for social workers employed as child welfare caseworkers. Each class covers 12 topics over a three-week period, but no tests are administered to assess what participants have learned.; Senior officials at DSS want local supervisors to be able to use results from the test to determine how much additional on-the-job training an employee may need. Officials also want to use the test in conjunction with other assessment tools to evaluate the curriculum.; This project used generally accepted practices as recommended by AERA, APA, and NCME to develop and analyze a test of general knowledge for the "Child Welfare in North Carolina" (CWNC) pre-service training curriculum. Items were written, reviewed by content experts, and either revised for inclusion on a pilot test or discarded. One hundred and twenty-nine participants took the pilot test, which was conducted from July 3, 2002 through October 18, 2002. Upon completion of the testing phase, psychometric properties were estimated under assumptions of classical test theory and reduced the pool of candidate items from 141 to 68. These 68 items that were selected for inclusion on the proposed official version cover eleven of the curriculum's twelve topics.