Effectiveness of a Three‐week Institute for Employment Service Counselors

Abstract

Forty-three employment service counselors participated in a three-week institute designed to improve their understanding of the conditions of poverty and of counseling theory and techniques. At the end of the institute, participants evaluated their experence favorably with substantial minority group criticisms, however, that (1) institute faculty were not sufficiently informed about Employment Service techniques and experiences and, that (2) not enough counseling practicum experiences were provided. Significant shifts in attitudes toward the poor were found at the end of the institute for 14 of 35 items of an attitude scale. For 6 of these 14 items, shifts in attitude were in the same direction and intensified after four and one-half months of field experience.Educators frequently recognize a need to evaluate the impact of instructional programs and do so both informally 2nd formally. Specially developed programs of instruction for a specific population and of short duration, such as institutes or workshops, are even more suspect and subjected to scrutiny than the regular instructional program.Demos and Zuwaylif (1963) studied changes in attitudes following a sixweek training program in counseling. They found that counselors changed from being evaluative, supportive, and probing to more understanding and interpretive. Similarly, Jones (1963) found changes from informing and advising to accepting and understanding and from focus on the immediate problem to consideration of the total setting of the counselee. Webb and Harris (1963), using the semantic differential techniques, found differences between the actual self and ideal self, with the evaluative factor being most sensitive to change. Moreover, in all three of these studies, institute participants reported generally favorable reactions to their institute program. One study (Munger, et al., 1964) demonstrated the persistence over a two year period of these favorable responses toward institute experience. These, and similar evaluative studies, suffer from one or both of two weaknesses. Either they lack sufficient follow-up study to demonstrate the degree of persistence of attitude changes found at the end of the institute, or, as in the case of the Munger, et al. (1964) study, they lack validating data to support participants' favorable responses to their institute experience.The present study was designed to determine participant's subjective responses to their institute experience and to determine changes in attitudes of participants, as well as to assess the degree of persistence of these attitude changes over a follow-up period.