A $25,000 grant from USC’s research and innovation fund will enable Kelly Turner, a research assistant professor with the USC School of Social Work, to test a new way of preparing students to work with veterans and other military clients.

Turner’s proposal was selected by the James H. Zumberge Research and Innovation Fund, which offers individual awards to newer research faculty to help launch their careers and support research in areas with limited funding opportunities.

Her project will compare the effectiveness of role-playing versus the use of standardized patients—that is, having an actor portray a military client and interact with students in a consistent manner—in the development of key clinical skills.

“Role-play is easy because it’s peer-to-peer, but there are some challenges,” she said. “If we’re classmates, I might go easy on you. When you’re with a stranger, and they are acting like a real person with real issues, then all of a sudden you’re a little more engaged, you’re under a little more cognitive load, and you’re either going to sink or swim.”

Turner will partner with the instructor of a course on clinical practices with military clients this fall to form two groups of students: one group that will practice their skills by role-playing and another that will interact with a trained actor.

Using an assessment tool developed by the school’s Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families, she will measure the development of clinical skills for each group of students. Turner also plans to gather feedback from field internship supervisors on how each student has progressed.

“If using standardized clients is affordable and works better, and we can inform classroom practices through research, it seems like the perfect thing to do at a place like this, that teaches a lot of people and cares about research,” she said.

Standardized patients are common in medical school, Turner noted, and there is some evidence of their use in a social work curriculum, although she has found they are typically used as an assessment tool rather than an educational component. To her knowledge, this study will be the first to pit role-playing against standardized patients in the field of military social work education.

Turner said she was honored to receive the award and hopes to have results by spring 2013.

“It’s really exciting to work in a place where you can get a grant to do something in the classroom to make the classroom experience better and to make students more prepared,” she said. “USC really does believe in research-informed curriculum and research-informed practice.”