Student-Faculty Interactions: An Underemphasized Dimension of Counselor Education

Accreditation standards, ethical codes, and literature on counselor educator and student interactions are explored. Potential research issues are suggested, and the impact of this information on programs is considered.     

USING DEMOGRAPHIC SUBGROUP AND DUMMY VARIABLE EQUATIONS TO PREDICT COLLEGE FRESHMAN GRADE AVERAGE

The purpose of this study was to determine whether adjustments for the differential prediction observed among sex, racial/ethnic, or age subgroups in one freshman class at a college could be used to improve prediction accuracy for these subgroups in future freshman classes. For older students, dummy variable and separate subgroup prediction equations were found, on cross-validation, to be more accurate than the total group equations. For sex subgroups, dummy variable and separate subgroup equations were only moderately effective in improving prediction accuracy. For racial/ethnic subgroups, they were more often than not less accurate, on cross-validation, than total group equations. Among all three kinds of demographic subgroupings, shifts over time in colleges' mean grade averages were found to be a more important source of prediction bias than differential prediction.     

Bridging the Gap Between Counselor Educators and the Administrators of Programs for the Elderly

This article compares the results of a nationwide survey of gerontological counseling experts and a sample of executive directors of Area Agencies on Aging identifying, confirming, and rank ordering the goals and roles of gerontological counselors. The data indicate that a wide gap exists between gerontological counselor educators and administrators of social service programs for the elderly in the priority they ascribe to the goals and roles of counselors of older persons. Social service program administrators, however, indicate that counseling can be readily incorporated into the aging services network as it presently exists.     

Designing a telematic learning environment in a social constructivist paradigm

The authors of this paper are engaged in designing and developing telematic learning environments to assist in programmes of initial teacher training. Two aspects have been supported by European Union (EU) funded programmes: the Telematics for Teacher Training (T3) and Reflect projects. Telematics is a term describing the combined use of information technology and telecommunications. The authors are not searching for a pedagogy of telematics but are seeking ways in which telematics can assist pedagogy. Their work specifically addresses the question of whether it is possible to design such environments in a social constructivist paradigm and the evaluation of their work regularly returns to the theoretical model of learning central to their training programmes. The authors will show that whereas the aspect of video-conferencing keeps faith with their view of the nature of learning, the design of the website is raising some issues that have, as yet, to be resolved     

EFFECTS OF EMPIRICAL OPTION WEIGHTING ON RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY OF AN ACADEMIC APTITUDE TEST1

Item options of shortened forms of the GRE Verbal and Quantitative tests were empirically weighted by two variants of a method originally attributed to Guttman (1941). When compared with formula scores, it was found that tests scored with the empirical weights were more reliable but less valid when correlated with undergraduate GPA. A factor analysis revealed large increases in variance accounted for by the first factor. It was suggested that the weighting procedures used tended to capitalize on omitting behavior which, although a highly reliable tendency, may be invalid.