An Examination of Counselor Preparation Doctoral Program Goals

Doctoral counselor education programs nationwide were surveyed to determine their relative emphases on the professional roles of instruction, supervision, scholarship, clinical practice, and leadership, and how they carried it out.     

Minority Faculty Representation and Hiring Practices in Counselor Education Programs

Counselor education chairpersons indicated that minority faculty members are under-represented and hired at a slower rate than are nonminority faculty members. Results are mixed in terms of advancement opportunities.     

Quality Assurance in an Academic Unit: A Case Study

Total quality management (TQM) is a philosophy that is now accepted worldwide in the business environment. However, in higher education, quality management is not widespread. Quality efforts are mainly limited to specific tasks, such as course development, curriculum design, laboratory certification, etc. The Division of Industrial Management at K. U. Leuven decided in 1990 to develop and implement a total quality approach in its organization. This process recently resulted in a total quality system based upon the implementation of a quality handbook. This paper describes this unique experience of TQM in an academic unit.     

The Introduction of Portfolios in Higher Education: a comparative study in the UK and the Netherlands

This article describes a comparative study of the introduction of student portfolios in two departments of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Portfolios are designed to facilitate effective management of lifelong learning, to provide a record of achievements and to encourage self-reflection by students.
The justifications for the portfolio initiative are different in the two countries. At the Vrije Universiteit, the initiative arose within the University but is being implemented by individual faculties. There is no standard model of implementation. At Nottingham Trent University, portfolios are being introduced as a response to a government directive, as part of a lifelong learning portfolio that each individual will carry forward into their working life. The University's response to this imperative is top-down and a University-wide model is being sought. The department model is one of several models that are being evaluated for this purpose.
This research project investigates whether these alternative starting points lead to differential responses from student users or not. Data are drawn from quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative (interviews with managers, consultants and teachers) sources. Similarities and differences in students' responses to the portfolio exercise are identified and discussed in terms of factors such as the way the portfolios are introduced, the incentives offered to complete them, the role of the lecturer and peers in the monitoring of study progress, the quality of self-regulative skills, and students' learning expectations.     

Professional Identification of Counselor Preparation Programs

A survey of 521 counselor preparation programs nationwide revealed that most programs with master's or both master's and doctoral degrees have a counseling professional orientation as opposed to psychological or other orientation.     

PREDICTION OF GRADE POINT AVERAGES IN NURSING SCHOOLS USING SECOND-ORDER MULTIPLE REGRESSION MODELS

The present study was concerned with the prediction of first year grade point averages of associate degree nursing students. The primary objective of this investigation was to determine whether the inclusion of quadratic and/or interaction terms in a regression model would improve the prediction of student nurses' grade averages. The predictor battery included cognitive, biographical, and personality variables. Results indicated that interaction and quadratic terms improve both the predictability of grade point averages and the replicability of these predictions. The inclusion of higher order terms in prediction research is suggested as a means of improving predictive efficiency.     

Engineering Design Simulation: A Computer-based Teaching Environment

In engineering education, design provides an excellent project-based environment in which to teach the fundamentals of synthesis, analysis and decision-making. It is proposed to create a computer-based teaching tool which provides a close simulation of the design environment. All activities of design, i. e. problem definition, conceptualizing, analysis, decision-making and documentation, are envisioned to be part of the simulation, which should be flexible in its use and highly interactive, with the student in full control for maximum learning benefit. While some real difficulties are foreseen in simulating the conceptual and intuitive areas of the design process, the more structured aspects of the design process are already computerized in engineering practice. Restricting the proposed simulation to a specific field of design should make the development of such a teaching tool entirely possible