Teaching a Course in Counseling Theories and Practice: Description and Evaluation

This article describes and evaluates an innovative way to teach a counseling theories and practices course to beginning counseling students. Cognitive and affective learning processes, continuous and systematic feedback, small group dynamics, and a cross-sectional approach to teaching theoretical concepts and techniques are described. This approach was implemented by using the following instructional format: didactic, demonstration, task simulation, and self-exploration. Evaluation included self—peer, student-staff, and staff-student evaluations and used measures obtained from six instrumented indices. Results suggest that this approach might be a useful alternative to teaching the traditional didactic course in theories and practices of counseling.     

COMMENT ON "FLUENCY AS A PERVASIVE ELEMENT IN THE MEASUREMENT OF CREATIVITY"

Clark and Mirels reported a "correction procedure" for fluency in scoring figural divergent thinking measures, which resulted in a reduction from .40 to .20 in the average inter-correlation of scores excluding fluency. Since their correction involved shortening the test, at least part of the reduction of the inter-correlations can be explained by the reduced reliability of the test. Estimates of the magnitude of this effect were provided. It was concluded that the "correction" reported is at best a partial correction, and that the potential merit of other procedures should be considered.     

Knowledge Adequacies and Training Needs of Rehabilitation Educators

This article describes results of a national survey of rehabilitation educators concerning their perceptions of their knowledge adequacies and training needs. Twelve vital instructional areas were identified and respondents were asked to rate each area for their adequacy of knowledge, need for inservice training, and willingness to attend inservice training. Findings showed that educators rated their knowledge adequacy high and their need for inservice training low. Although there was a significant inverse relationship between knowledge adequacy and need for inservice training, there was no significant relationship between willingness to attend inservice training and knowledge adequacy, or between willingness to attend inservice training and need for inservice training.     

A STUDY OF HYPOTHESES BASIC TO THE USE OF RIGHTS AND FORMULA SCORES

The hypothesis that some students, when tested under formula directions, omit items about which they have useful partial knowledge implies that such directions are not as fair as rights directions, especially to those students who are less inclined to guess. This hypothesis may be called the differential effects hypothesis. An alternative hypothesis states that examinees would perform no better than chance expectation on items that they would omit under formula directions but would answer under rights directions. This may be called the invariance hypothesis. Experimental data on this question were obtained by conducting special test administrations of College Board SAT-verbal and Chemistry tests and by including experimental tests in a Graduate Management Admission Test administration. The data provide a basis for evaluating the two hypotheses and for assessing the effects of directions on the reliability and parallelism of scores for sophisticated examinees taking professionally developed tests. Results support the invariance hypothesis rather than the differential effects hypothesis.