For social work students preparing to take the Licensed Social Worker (LSW) examination, preparation materials can come with a significant hurdle: cost. Rutgers School of Social Work faculty members Drs. Christine Chapais, Jack Lewis, and Tangela Sawyerr are working to change that.
The three faculty members have received a $3,500 authoring award through the Rutgers University Libraries Open and Affordable Textbooks (OAT) Program to create a new, openly licensed LSW exam preparation workbook. The free digital resource will be designed to help aspiring social workers prepare for the licensing examination without having to purchase commercial study materials.
“We want this to remove the financial barrier that commercial exam prep materials create, while also going beyond rote memorization,” said the team.
The OAT Program supports Rutgers instructors who create new open educational resources or redesign courses to use free or low-cost materials. This year’s awards are expected to reduce course-material costs for 2,528 Rutgers students by an estimated $365,555 during the 2026-2027 academic year. Including those projected savings, the program will have saved Rutgers students approximately $14 million.
While there are numerous commercial resources available to help candidates prepare for social work licensing exams, the faculty team identified a significant gap in the open educational resource landscape: there is currently no comprehensive, openly licensed LSW exam preparation workbook available through the major Open Education Resources (OER) repositories.
Their new workbook will be freely available to anyone preparing for the LSW exam, not just Rutgers students. The resource will include original practice questions mapped to the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) content outlines, a full-length simulated practice exam, and contextual information about research examining disparities in licensing exam pass rates.
The project comes at an important moment for candidates and educators. The ASWB examination changed significantly on August 3, 2026, and the team will use the updated content blueprint to guide the workbook’s development. Drs. Chapais, Lewis, and Sawyerr will combine their experience facilitating LSW preparation workshops with published research on licensing exam outcomes. Their goal is to create a resource that helps students understand not only what answers are correct, but why.
Rather than simply providing a collection of practice questions, the workbook will emphasize ethical and clinical reasoning. Students will learn strategies for breaking down exam vignettes into structured steps and will have access to rationales that explain the reasoning behind answers. The team also plans to dedicate a section of the workbook to equity and access in social work licensure. That section will provide information and resources related to tutoring, study groups, accommodations, and financial assistance, while helping readers understand research surrounding disparities in exam outcomes.
For the faculty members, making preparation materials accessible is connected to a larger goal: supporting the social work workforce. “We see this as a way to help more qualified candidates get licensed and into the field, especially given the workforce shortage and need for representation within social work,” they said.
The project is being developed collaboratively, with Drs. Chapais, Lewis, and Sawyerr meeting every other week to move the work forward. They are dividing responsibilities based on their individual strengths and interests and will cross-review one another’s sections before finalizing the project. This review process will focus on accuracy, clarity, and bias, helping ensure that the finished resource is rigorous, useful, and accessible to its intended audience.
The team plans to spend the next six months researching and writing, including mapping content to the updated ASWB blueprint, drafting each content area, and developing the full practice exam. Following review, editing, and formatting in Pressbooks, they aim to publish the completed open workbook in the summer of 2027.
By creating a resource that is free, openly licensed, and available beyond Rutgers, the team hopes their project will extend the impact of the OAT award far beyond the classroom, helping aspiring social workers prepare for licensure and take the next step toward entering the profession.
