Summary: There is widespread interest on the part of social work degree students in developing their courtroom skills within a framework of learning about social work law, but it is often not until they qualify and are ‘thrown in at the deep end’ that anyone gives any serious thought to the need for preparation and skills development in this area. As a result, students and newly-qualified social workers are frequently apprehensive about court work, which means that they do not always do themselves, or the people who use social work services, justice when faced with court involvement. This article offers a model for practice assessors to use with students in agencies where court work is undertaken, and encourages skills development against a foundation of critical analysis and reflection. The term ‘practice assessor’ has been adopted by the General Social Care Council in preference to the previously widely-used term ‘practice teacher’ to describe the person responsible for facilitating learning and supervising and assessing social work students in practice. Within this model, ‘practice assessor’ is interchangeable with ‘practice teacher’, and indeed most of the suggested learning activities primarily involve a facilitative or teaching, rather than an assessment, role.

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The purpose of the study was a description of hemispheric specialization characteristics of normally developing right- and left-handed children and determination of what differences in such characteristics, if any, existed between young normally developing and older slowly developing children. With dichaptic and tachistoscopic methods, hemispheric specialization characteristics of 15 slowly developing children (5-0 to 9-6 yr.) and 25 normally developing children (6-0 to 6-11 yr.) were assessed. Latencies and the number of correct responses were analyzed. Both right- and left-handed normally developing 6-yr.-olds showed considerable evidence of bilateralization of hemispheric functions for spatial and verbal information processing; slowly developing children exhibited unusual patterns of hemispheric specialization usually opposite those typically expected in children or adults. Response latency measures of performances of slowly developing children suggested a bilateralization of hemispheric function for processing of verbal and spatial information; number of correct responses indicated that lateralization of such functions was present.