***The following story by Susan Hickman appears in the September issue of Carleton Now.
Shevaun Corey has always had a passion for learning, how people learn, how we structure our learning environment and under what circumstances we learn best.
So it shouldn’t be any surprise that the 32-year-old psychology graduate is digging deep into the impact of Correctional Service of Canada’s (CSC) correctional officer training program.
Following the examination of her PhD thesis, An evaluation of the Correctional Officer Training Program delivered by the Correctional Service of Canada, in August, Corey explains the significance of her research work.
“Largely, organizations as a whole shy away from training evaluation,” Corey says, “mainly because they have limited training budgets.”
But, in fact, Corey believes it is essential that the evaluation process be built into a program’s design, and credits CSC for its decision to engage in an evaluation of its training program for new recruits to determine its effectiveness and the impact once trainees begin working in the institutional environment.
“I found the correctional training program was effective,” Corey says. “Trainees reacted positively to the training and felt it was relevant to their jobs. I looked at knowledge, skills and attitudes stemming from the objectives of the program, and I found significant learning gains in most areas.”
While Corey admits there is some loss in knowledge, skill and attitude levels once officers are on the job, levels still remain high. In addition, her study will help determine how training programs should be evaluated to maximize an agency’s ability to make effective decisions about training programs.
Publicly funded organizations, she says, are moving away from a reactive approach to a results-oriented way of doing business.
“But for a lot of organizations with budget cuts come cuts to training initiatives. And the incorporation of training evaluation becomes even more important. Not only does CSC now have feedback that their training program is indeed having the intended impact, but also it now has recommendations for potential modifications.”
Corey specifically recommends enhanced refresher training and reference aids for officers on the job.
“The better their training, the more we can prepare them to enter an institutional environment and the better they can deal with challenges encountered on the job.”
Corey’s study, which took her four years from the time she began to design the evaluation plan, followed on the heels of her master’s degree, earned at Carleton in 2006. Her master’s research examined the effects of simulation training in a military domain. After working on a contract involving correctional training with CSC and her supervisor, psychology Prof. Craig Bennell, who is the director of the Police Research Lab at Carleton, Corey says her thesis was the next logical step.
“I happened to be in the right place at the right time,” she notes. “It was a fantastic opportunity for me to carry out research in a field setting.”
Corey and her evaluation team travelled across the country to collect data from the Pacific, Ontario and Quebec regions. With her thesis under her belt, she is now working full time for CSC’s learning and development branch to further develop evaluation guidelines and carry out evaluations of other training programs.
“I love what I do. As an evaluator, you get the best of both worlds. You can interact with the curriculum designers and the facilitators, as well as the trainees. You get to experience all parts of the learning process.”
Corey, who first came to Carleton eight years ago for its forensic psychology program and to work with Bennell, now teaches a first-year seminar in forensic psychology at the university twice a week.
