Describing the impact of required diversity courses on beginning social work students developing multicultural competence

A consistent demand in the social service field is the need for culturally competent practitioners and organizations. Social work education has long history of including content on vulnerable, marginalized populations and addressing diversity. The literature is rich with conceptual articles addressing the values, importance, and strategies for teaching this content. Few empirical articles exist. They evaluate teaching methodologies or experiences of subgroups of social work students. Social work educators have neither developed nor made use of an empirically validated instrument to describe the impact of diversity courses on beginning students developing multicultural competence.;This study applied a standardized empirically validated instrument, the Multicultural Awareness, Knowledge, Skills Survey (MAKSS) (D'Andrea, Daniel & Heck, 1991) to examine change in scores for beginning social work students subsequent to their taking a required diversity course. An N = 386 (55% return rate) of social work students from 10 social work programs participated. The study used a retrospective pre- and posttest design involving a one-time delivery of the survey. Strengths of this design include reducing social desirability responding and controlling for response shift bias.;T-test of paired samples of differences for the three subscales and total scale reflect a consistent pattern in student self-assessment. (Total Scale: t = 24.79, df = 385, p < .05 one-tailed). One way MONVA described factors associated with change in student outcomes: Race/ethnicity accounted for variance in the Awareness subscale; age was associated with significant difference in the Knowledge subscale; and an interaction between age and prior exposure to diversity content accounted for the greatest variance for the Skill subscale and total Survey scale. Bonferroni post hoc comparisons confirmed statistically significant changes in student self-assessment.;Findings demonstrated that students' multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills were positively impacted by participation in a required diversity course. Strengths included sample size, number of minority participants (25.1%), geographical representation and design. Limitations were non-randomization, possible selection bias and use of a self-assessment measure. A significant limitation was the lack of social work programs from the south. Findings suggest further development of measures assessing student learning on diversity and impact to practice.