Chapter VIII: The Evaluation of Guidance and Personnel Services

A s THE GUIDANCE movement enters into its second half-century, there is general recognition of the need for evaluation of its services, but little evidence that the need is being met. Guidance services, like many others in education, are still offered largely on the bases of hope and faith. Cottle's statement (8) three years ago about the paucity of, and the great need for, co-operative and better-designed research is as apropos today as it was then. Only three books evaluating guidance services have been published during the 50 years since such services began, and one describing an extensive follow-up appeared during the period under review. (All other reports were brief articles in which the period covered from the application of the guidance service to its evaluation was relatively short.) In that book Rothney (34) described his attempt to assess vocational, educational, and social activities of two groups at six months, two and one-half years, and five years after high-school graduation. The experimental group consisted of 343 subjects who had been counseled and who were compared with 342 members of a control group who had received no special counseling while they were in senior high school. The many findings of the research were summarized in his statement that counseling did 3eem to assist in the accomplishment of the objectives of the American secondary school. General discussions of the need for evaluation of guidance services appeared frequently, and some of them raised issues that should be considered by evaluators. Patterson's discussion (27) of matching versus randomization in studies of counseling merited special attention. Callis, Polmantier, and Roeber (3 ) , in their summary of five years of research on counseling at the University of Missouri, raised some crucial questions. Coleman (6) listed 26 evaluative studies that he thought were needed. Heist (18) , Hall (17) , the Fifty-Eighth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part II (1 ) , and Strang (37) placed evaluation studies high on their lists of researches desirable in guidance.

[1]  Anthony C. Riccio,et al.  The Evaluation of Guidance Services , 1962 .

[2]  H. Borow.  Frontiers of Personnel Research in Education , 1959, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education.

[3]  L. D. Goodstein,et al.  Client Satisfaction, Counselors, and the Counseling Process , 1959 .

[4]  W. B. Phillips.  COUNSELING: A Special Service in Public Assistance , 1959 .

[5]  H. Estrin.  How Good Are Professional Career Speakers , 1959 .

[6]  M. Robertson.  Results of a Pre-College Testing and Counseling Program , 1959 .

[7]  William S. Cottle.  Doctoral theses in counseling and student personnel work. , 1959 .

[8]  Paul T King,et al.  Student Perception of Counseling Center Services , 1959 .

[9]  H. Grater.  When Counseling Success Is Failure , 1958 .

[10]  W. Cottle,et al.  Theses in Counseling and Student Personnel Work: (To June, 1957) Reported by 175 Fellows and Associates of Division 17. , 1958 .

[11]  J. Rothney.  Guidance practices and results , 1958 .

[12]  S. Caravello.  Effectiveness of High School Guidance Services , 1958 .

[13]  C. W. Burnett,et al.  Evaluative criteria for the VA vocational counseling service. , 1958 .

[14]  M. Robertson.  A comparison of counselor and student reports of counseling interviews. , 1958 .

[15]  R. Hall.  Occupational Group Contrasts in Terms of the Differential Aptitude Tests: An Application of Multiple Discriminant Analysis1 , 1957 .

[16]  G. Mayo,et al.  A Procedure of Applying Knowledge of Results to the Predictions of Vocational Counselors , 1957 .

[17]  C. H. Patterson.  A comparison of counseled and noncounseled industrial school students. , 1957 .

[18]  G. E. Hill,et al.  Guidance and the Drop-Out Rate in 19 southeastern Ohio schools , 1957 .

[19]  J. Rothney,et al.  An Examination of A Method for Evaluating Counseling , 1957 .

[20]  Florence E. Purcell.  Counseling Assignments and Efficiency , 1957 .

[21]  William Coleman.  The Role of Evaluation in Improving Guidance and Counseling Services , 1957 .

[22]  N. Kiell.  FRESHMAN EVALUATION Of Faculty Counselors , 1957 .

[23]  J. S. Weeks.  Level of affect in the counseling responses of high school senior boys. , 1957 .

[24]  J. Porter.  Clients' evaluations of services at the University of Chicago Counseling Center. , 1957 .

[25]  E. Roeber,et al.  Five years of research on counseling. , 1957 .

[26]  R. S. Thrush.  An agency in transition: The case study of a counseling center. , 1957 .

[27]  J. W. Gustad,et al.  The effects of client and counselor personality characteristics on client learning in counseling. , 1957 .

[28]  J. C. Wright,et al.  The assessment of an educational guidance clinic. , 1957 .

[29]  L. D. Goodstein,et al.  The use of clients as judges of the counselor's performance. , 1957 .

[30]  Aileen Poole.  Counselor judgment and counseling evaluation. , 1957 .

[31]  J. W. Gustad,et al.  The effects of different methods of test introduction and interpretation on client learning in counseling. , 1957 .

[32]  G. Farwell.  A Coordinated Program of ADMISSIONS AND COUNSELING , 1956 .

[33]  B. A. Kirk.  Evaluation of in-Service Counselor Training , 1956 .

[34]  C. H. Patterson.  Matching versus randomization in studies of counseling. , 1956 .