Intro To Counseling

Front 1

Describe what accountability usually involves.

Back 1

• Identifying and collaborating with stakeholder groups (e.g. advisory committees, clients, parents, teachers, students).
• Collecting data and assessing the needs of clients, staff, and community.
• Setting goals and establishing objectives based on data and determined needs
• Implementing effective interventions to address the goals and objective
• Measuring the outcomes or results of these interventions
• Using the results for program improvement
• Sharing results with major stakeholder groups (e.g., clients, administrators, teachers and staff members, parents and guardians, students, school boards, community and business leaders, professional counselors, and supervisors)

Front 2

What is included in an efficient needs assessment?

Back 2

• Decide what you need to know
• Decide on the best approach
• Determine or develop the needs assessment instrument or method.
• Enlist the support of colleagues and a few individuals from the target groups to review and try out items for understanding
• Implement the final version on the target groups
• Tabulate, analyze, and interpret the results
• Translate the results into programmatic goals and objectives

Front 3

Describe what a professional counselor should take into account when determining which research design to use.

Back 3

A professional counselor should consider when designing outcome studies and which
design to use:
1. If the treatment has already been implemented – If intervention has not been then there are a number of options however, if it has occurred then you could do a nonexperimental design.
2. Can I randomly assign participants to treatment conditions? – If you are able to do so the great but if not then you must choose quasiexperimental or nonexperimental design.
3. Can I conduct (one or several) pretests, post-tests, or both?

Front 4

Describe the differences of a true experimental design and a non-experimental design.

Back 4

True experimental design:
• There are two elements:
-random assignment of the participants
-manipulation of an independent variable
• examples:
-randomized pretest-post-test control group design
-randomized post-test only control group design

Non-experimental designs: no random assignment of the participants and no manipulation of an independent variable. Examples are:
-pretest-post-test single-group design
-case study
-static-group comparison

Quasiexperimental designs: no random assignment of the participants to groups. Examples are:
- Two-sample pretest-post-test design
- Nonequivalent control group design
- Time series design

Front 5

What is the difference between formative versus summative evaluation?

Back 5

• Formative evaluation: is evaluative feedback that occurs during the implementation of a program. It allows corrective action to occur if an implemented program is shown to be off course.
• Summative evaluation: is feedback collected at a specified end point in an evaluation process. It is conducted most frequently.

Front 6

Describe process evaluation

Back 6

Process evaluation should be conducted near the end of the academic year and the reports of this evaluation should include program strengths, areas of improvement, and long and short term goals.

Front 7

Describe Service Assessment

Back 7

B. Service assessment are requested by agency directors, counseling supervisors, superintendents and school boards to document how counselors are spending their time. There are two types of service assessments: Event topic counts and time logs.

- Event topic counts document each time a counselor communicates with an individual or provides a counseling service and the nature of the topic addressed. Professional counselors can keep a tally of how many clients seen.
- Time log documents the amount of time spent in various counseling or non-counseling related activities. Requires the counselor to document and categorize their activities every minute of the workday. May be necessary for funding purposes.

Front 8

Describe Outcome evaluation

Back 8

C. Outcome evaluation or results evaluation gathers all data and questions if the clients or students any different from the intervention techniques provided. The results from interpreting data from the different assessments must be used to change a specific program or parts of the program to continuously improve it. Goal setting and posing of new questions about the revised program keep the assessment cycle going.