Research in Clinical Supervision: Revitalizing a Scientific Agenda

The purpose of this article was to revitalize and disentangle common misconceptions about a scientific agenda for clinical supervision.     

SAT SCORES AND AMERICAN STATES: SEEKING FOR USEFUL MEANING

Despite difficulties, states frequently seek to compare their test performance with that of other states, or with the published national norms. All states have some students taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) exams for college admissions, but because the numbers vary widely, when the state means are made public by the College Boards, there is debate about their interpretation. Here the 50 state SAT means are the criterion in a multivariate model, together with the state variables of percent taking the SATs (very influential), percent of minority in the state, average income, unemployment rate, and per pupil expenditure. Regression is analyzed (without expenditure) to examine the state residuals compared with the "expected" scores. And briefly noted is the difficulty of using alternative tests for such comparisons, as these are currently normed, selected, and used.     

BOOK REVIEWS

A HISTORY OF EDUCATION IN AMERICAN CULTURE. By R. Freeman Butts and Lawrence A. Cremin.
ACADEMIC PROCESSION. By Ernest Earnest.
THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE. By Gordon W. Allport.
THE TEACHING-LEARNING PROCESS. By Nathaniel Cantor.     

Voices of Care and Justice in Clinical Supervision: Issues and Interventions

The article by Twohey and Volker (1993) provides a useful point of departure for discussing gender bias in supervision and for offering suggestions for supervisors.     

Some Curriculum Ideas for Training Public Offender Counselors

Counselor education programs that train counselors for work in corrections need to supplement their curriculum in critical content and issue areas. Correctional counselors need specialized coursework in addition to training in traditional counseling techniques. This article reviews the current curriculum areas of many counselor education master's programs that are relevant to correctional counselors, and also suggests some ideas for additional content that might expand these curriculums to better meet the needs of correctional counselors.     

SEEKING A MEASURE OF GENERAL EDUCATIONAL ADVANCEMENT: THE BENTEE1

An urgent need is for some overall unit of educational benefit, and it is here proposed that such be established by certain scaling techniques. Groups of judges are asked to render overall evaluations on “students” of specified characteristics. Their evaluations are studied for correlation with the student traits, and the resultant coefficients, loaded with latent and applied values, become defensible weights to describe other students' overall educational advancement. The general unit so developed, when normalized for the target population, may be termed a “benefit T-score”, or more simply “bentee”. Recursive features of the scaling process, applicable at different levels of generality, should provide for a shift from value-space to test-space, and from societal to expert opinion. Discovered weightings should illuminate differing values of lay and professional groups within society. And the bentee could provide an objective function suitable for optimizing in management-science techniques, now largely neglected in curriculum and administration.