Using Audit Trail Assignments to Develop DSW Students’ Skills as Practitioner-Scholars

Doctor of Social Work students must learn to engage critically with research, think innovatively about practice, and make professional scholarly contributions. Skills in reading critically, writing academically, and synthesizing and integrating large bodies of literature do not typically align with skills used in social work practice. For new doctoral students, the learning curve for engaging ideas in a scholarly way can be steep given many of them enter doctoral programs after working for many years in their respective fields. Audit trails (i.e., research journals), used often in qualitative research, comprise a document where a researcher logs the process of developing a topic or idea, makes sense of data or information related to the project, and documents decision making during analysis and write-up. This article discusses how audit trails can be used as a pedagogical strategy to cultivate metacognition and other high-order thinking skills that are central to doctoral education. The article also details a class assignment in which students were asked to keep an audit trail to document their progress and process in completing a final class paper. Audit trails are a pragmatic tool to teach new doctoral students the backstage work of preparing a scholarly product.