Objective: Social worker-teacher classroom collaboration (SWTCC) is an innovative model of intervention for at-risk elementary school children in which a social worker and a teacher work together in the same classroom. The model was evaluated to determine whether or not the intervention improved attendance, classroom behavior, and grades. Method: SWTCC was implemented using social work interns in two classrooms in an urban elementary school in Albany, New York. The classrooms were chosen because they had high proportions of children displaying attendance, behavioral, and academic difficulties. The model was evaluated through a quasiexperimental design in which two classrooms receiving the intervention were compared with two similar classrooms that did not receive it. Results: A repeated measures ANOVA indicated that the intervention classrooms surpassed the comparisons classrooms in respect to attendance and a number of behavioral variables. There were no significant differences in grades. Social worker, teacher, pupil, and parent questionnaires revealed that the intervention was perceived positively. Conclusions: SWTCC shows sufficient promise to warrant further development and testing. It may be particularly suited for use in conjunction with social work field education. The use of social work students as collaborators may make the model feasible from a cost perspective. Moreover, SWTCC should provide students with a rich hands-on experience in collaborative work.Collaborative efforts between social workers and teachers are growing in importance in light of the move toward school-based and school-linked services for children and their families (Denham

Interest in the use of monetary incentives as a means to motivate students to attend school or to improve their performance has been growing. In the present study, teenage girls at risk of school failure were randomly assigned to either a control condition or to one of two year-long experimental programs aimed at improving their academic work and attendance: (1) a “payment” program in which they were given only monetary incentives for improved performance or (2) a case-management program in which social workers, teachers, the girls, and their parents. worked together to develop and implement ways to help the girls do better. Both experimental programs surpassed the control condition with respect to positive changes in grades and attendance. The case-management outcomes were clearly superior to those of the payment program. However, neither program's effects appeared to carry over to the following year, which suggests that more sustained intervention may be necessary to bring about enduring improvement in the girls’ school performance.

Approaches for systematically constructing, evaluating, improving, and disseminating human service interventions offer the potential for enhancing the effectiveness of social work practice. However, there has been little study of how such approaches actually work when carried out. This article presents a comprehensive case study of how one of them—the design and development (D&D) paradigm of Edwin J. Thomas and Jack Rothman—was applied in the development of a case management intervention for problems of school failure. The application reveals the strengths of the paradigm as well as areas in which further work is needed. For example, greater attention needs to be given to (a) the possible impact of financial, political, ethical, and other contextual factors on the development process; (b) procedures for advanced development in the absence of experimental evaluations; and (c) criteria for marketing an intervention whose effectiveness has not been fully demonstrated.

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Despite the importance given to student field performance evaluations in social work education, little empirical evidence has supported their validity. In the study described in this article, field supervisors' ratings of student performance in the field were compared to an independent judge's content analyses of tape recordings of their performance. The results revealed significant correlations between the supervisors'and the judge's ratings, providing evidence for the validity of the supervisors' evaluations. It i s argued that the validity of the these evaluations may have been enhanced by the students' use o f a well-specified intervention model and of structured recording forms.