Abstract / Summary
The ability to make high-quality decisions in ambiguous, uncertain, and time-pressured work situations is crucial in many sectors. This can be challenging in fields with high turnover, such as most emergency services, and means that recent graduates and novices in the field are often put on the frontline early on without the chance to acquire in-depth experience-. While previous research has studied how experienced practitioners make decisions in real-life situations, including in the emergency services, we still know little about the processes that allow acceleration of expertise development for novices and how higher education training could contribute to this. This study used the example of child protection and social work education to examine whether decision-making training with video feedback from experienced practitioners could improve novice social workers’ decision quality, using an experimental study design (n=83 novice professionals), with a feedback and no-feedback condition respectively, and realistic child protection scenarios. Results showed an increase of decision-quality for both treatment and control groups, suggesting that the training alone already induced learning, even without expert feedback. However, consistent with our hypotheses, the treatment group with feedback showed significantly greater improvement in qualitative aspects of decision-making compared to the no-feedback control group, namely a better understanding of the risks involved and in assessing the quality of available information. We conclude that online training with expert feedback can be a promising and economically viable educational measure for improving decision quality and accelerating the expertise of recent graduates, namely in high-turnover fields such as child protection.