African Americans’ Perception of Mental Health Professions

This study explored African-Americans perceptions of various mental health professions through the ranking of confidence levels across five case vignettes of varying psychiatric severity. Results indicated that African-Americans viewed psychologists and doctoral level licensed professional counselors with similar levels of confidence and ranked doctoral level licensed professional counselors above masters level counselors in every case example. Congruent with previous studies, the African American sample was confident in counselors ability to treat less severe cases and less confident in their ability to treat more severe cases.     

Incorporating Personality Assessment Into Counseling to Help College Students Adopt and Maintain Exercise Behaviors

The authors investigated the influence of several personality traits on exercise adherence and exercise self‐efficacy for 168 undergraduate students. At all levels of exercise adherence, students with different personality traits had different amounts of exercise self‐efficacy. Implications for college counselors working with students to improve exercise adherence are considered.     

Effects of Classroom Technology Policies on Students' Perceptions of Instructors: What is Your Syllabus Saying about You?

The technology policies included on instructors' syllabi vary greatly and, in some cases, may unfavorably influence students' perceptions of the instructor. To examine this hypothesis, we randomly assigned college students enrolled in psychology courses at two different institutions (N = 163) to groups in which they viewed different syllabi for a community psychology course. The syllabi varied by the hypothetical instructor's technology policy (encouraging of appropriate technology use in the classroom, discouraging of all technology use, or a mixture of both) and instructor gender. Results showed that students rated instructors similarly on the Competency/Communication factor across all conditions but rated them significantly lower on the Rapport factor when the syllabus included a discouraging technology policy. Rapport ratings were also associated with students' self-reported dependence on technology. High instructor Rapport was associated with high levels of students' technology dependency in the encouraging technology policy condition (r = .29, p < .05), but low levels of technology dependency in the discouraging condition (r = ?.31, p < .05). Our findings suggest that if instructors include technology policies on their syllabi that restrict inappropriate technology use, they should also indicate situations in which technology use is appropriate.     

Time engaged in reading. A critical factor in reading achievement.

The reading achievement of deaf children may be low not only as a result of factors related to the hearing loss, such as a lag in language development. Environmental factors such as the quantity and quality of reading instruction, for example, may also cause low reading achievement. This study looked at the amount of time spent reading and the types of teacher interactions during reading instruction in classrooms at a school for deaf children and associated satellite classes in New Zealand. It was found that the deaf children spent very low levels of time engaged in reading and were subjected to teacher interactions that may inhibit the development of meaning-based reading skills. The quantity and quality of reading instruction for deaf children may differ from that experienced by most hearing children in New Zealand.     

Assessing the Cognitive Development of Counseling Students: Changes in Epistemological Assumptions

The author investigated the cognitive development of counseling students at 3 points in their training. A cross‐sectional analysis of 205 counseling master's students at 13 colleges and universities showed a linear trend between the students' progression through the program and their cognitive development. Initial results of a longitudinal study of students in 2 counseling programs corresponded with the results of the cross‐sectional data. The results of the cross‐sectional and initial longitudinal studies lend initial support to the idea that it may be possible to capture the broad development of counselor education students with a generalized model.     

Personal persistence,identity development,and suicide: a study of Native and Non-native North American adolescents

The cross-cultural program of research presented here is about matters of temporal persistence--personal persistence and cultural persistence--and about solution strategies for solving the paradox of "sameness-in-change." The crux of this paradox resides in the fact that, on threat of otherwise ceasing to be recognizable as a self, all of us must satisfy at least two constitutive conditions. The first of these is that selves are obliged to keep moving or die, and, so, must continually change. The second is that selves must also somehow remain the same, lest all notions of moral responsibility and any commitment to an as yet unrealized future become nonsensical. Although long understood as a problem demanding the attention of philosophers, we argue that this same paradox arises in the ordinary course of identity development and dictates the different developmental routes taken by culturally mainstream and Aboriginal youth in coming to the identity-preserving conclusion that they and others are somehow continuous through time. Findings from a set of five studies are presented. The first and second studies document the development and refinement of a method for parsing and coding what young people say on the topic of personal persistence or self-continuity. Both studies demonstrate that it is not only possible to seriously engage children as young as age 9 or 10 years in detailed and codable discussions about personal persistence, but that their reasoning concerning such matters typically proceeds in an orderly and increasingly sophisticated manner over the course of their early identity development. Our third study underscores the high personal costs of failing to sustain a workable sense of personal persistence by showing that failures to warrant self-continuity are strongly associated with increased suicide risk in adolescence. Study four documents this same relation between continuity and suicide, this time at the macrolevel of whole cultures, and shows that efforts by Aboriginal groups to preserve and promote their culture are associated with dramatic reductions in rates of youth suicide. In the final study we show that different default strategies for resolving the paradox of personal persistence and change--Narrative and Essentialist strategies--distinctly characterize Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth.     

Multiple Perspectives in Supervision: Using a Peer Consultation Model to Enhance Supervisor Development

Research and literature in the profession of counselor supervision primarily focus on the development of the trainee and what supervision and supervisors can do to help foster that development. Considerably less attention has been paid to the developmental path of the supervisor or how specific training or experiences in supervision can be used in intentional ways to help influence the development of the supervisor. This article reviews what is known about supervisor development and discusses a specific intervention, the use of a peer consultation model with an intentionally diverse group of supervisors, to enhance supervisor cognitive development.     

The Development of a Service-Learning Program for First-Year Students Based on the Hallmarks of High Quality Service-learning and Rigorous Program Evaluation

We describe six hallmarks of high quality service-learning and explain how these considerations guided the development of a Transitional Coaching Program (TCP) during the first three years of implementation. We have demonstrated that the TCP is acceptable, feasible, and sustainable. Improvements have been seen in the degree of impact on learning objectives, but statistically significant change has not yet been achieved. This project highlights the importance of looking beyond satisfaction and engaging in rigorous assessment of learning objectives and ongoing quality improvement through attention to best practices and evidence-based, continuous quality improvement.