Comparisons Between Short‐ and Long‐Term NDEA Guidance Institute Students

Abstract

The continued support of the federal government for education, particularly the introduction of the NDEA Guidance and Counseling Institutes, has offered and presented to counselor educators an opportunity to work with fairly large groups of student counselors and permit observation of these students and their performance in a rather controlled counselor education program. One of the assumptions behind the year-long institutes is the concept that longer exposure to variables within the preparation program might result in more changes in attitudes and values. In addition, it might be assumed that this lengthy exposure might cause the changes to have a larger magnitude than those changes which might occur in students who have undergone short-term (summer only) institutes. Munger et al. (1964) did find that attitudes changed in his student counselors after exposure to an eightweek summer institute, and Rochester (1965) found that student attitudes changed Significantly after a year-long program (eight months). But a search of the literature has not revealed a comparative study between these two groups based on common variables they might bring into the program.The question that was posed for this investigation concerns a comparison of initial pre-training and post-training attitudes and values of the students from an NDEA Summer Institute and a group of students from eight year-long NDEA Institutes. MethodologySince one of the authors (Rochester, 1965) had previously collected significant data from eight randomly-selected year-long NDEA Guidance and Counseling Institutes, it seemed only appropriate to make further use of these data. The short-term, summer, NDEA

NDEA Participants Prepared for Inner‐City Counseling: A Ten‐Year Follow‐Up

“…These funded projects had vanous focuses, but were generally aimed at improving the educational experiences of prospective and/or in-service counselors. Follow-up studies of such institutes have usually sought to examine postinstitute attitudes and values of former institute participants on the basis of various standardized instruments (Bernos, 1966;Munger, Myers, & Brown, 1963; Munger 8c Johnson, 1960;Rochester, 1967;Rochester & Cottingham, 1969;and Rochester & Hopke, 1969). Such studies have also been relatively short-term, as they were usually one, two, or three-year postinstitute studies.A two-year postinstitute study by Munger, Brown, & Needham (1964) departed from the above pattern of studies by examining the degree to which former institute participants were using their counseling preparation.…”