Microcounseling: Techniques in Assessing Clients' Attitudes toward Guidance Tests

Microcounseling techniques were used to conduct an experimental study. The objective was to train naive college students who were interested in counseling to assess clients' attitudes toward guidance tests. A correlation of .797 was obtained between clients' ratings of attitudes toward tests and the trainees' ratings of clients' attitudes toward tests. Findings were consistent with the results of other microcounseling studies. Individual differences among the trainees were noted and comparisons were made between the trainees' own ratings, judges' ratings, and clients' ratings of trainees. Lack of a control group imposes a serious limitation on interpretation of the results.     

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.     

Providing Training About Sexual Orientation in Counselor Education

The status of training about sexual orientation in counselor education and the importance of including gender-related issues is discussed. A course designed to prepare counselors-in-training is presented.     

Developing Instruments to Capture Young People's Perceptions of how School as a Learning Environment Affects their Well-Being

This article describes the Universal Education Foundation's (UEF) activities to create research tools and methodologies that capture the voices of children concerning their perceptions of the effect of the school learning environment on their well-being. UEF defines well-being as the realisation of one's physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual potential. The Voice of Children (VOC) toolkit includes a survey and techniques to conduct focus groups as ways for young people to share their views. Young people participated in the development of the pilot instruments and, perhaps more importantly, they are involved as agents of change, presenting the findings through advocacy events to those who make decisions about policies and programmes that can have a positive impact on well-being. While UEF will be examining the effects of many learning environments — school, information and communications technologies (ICT) and media, and health care settings — this article focuses on the school as one learning environment.
Methods to create Version One of the Voice of Children ( VOC1 ) and preliminary findings from the initial pilot in Palestine are described. Steps taken to revise the instruments and create Version Two for Wales ( VOC2 ) are discussed. UEF's definition of well-being and its sub-components, background research and theoretical framework, hypotheses and structure of the survey are reviewed. The overarching hypothesis is that learning environments — in this case the school — affect various aspects of young people's well-being, both overall and in its sub-components.