Asian Journal of Counselling

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to evaluate the effectiveness of a counseling skill training course, to examine counselor's skills, helpee's self-involvement in relation to counseling outcome, and to investigate changes of both counselor's and helpee's responses within and across counseling sessions. 24 university students majoring in counseling enrolled in a 32 hour's counseling training course and they served as the experimental group. Another 19 non-enrolled students from the same class served as the control group. The training course provided lecture, modeling, role-play, and coaching counseling skills. In addition, each enrolled student was required to conduct and audiotaped four real counseling sessions with highg school students. The effectiveness of the training course was evaluated by a post written test on counseling responses to compare differences on scale scores between the two groups. Counselor's and helpee's verbal responses, and counseling outcome were also evaluated through counseling audiotapes by using Carkhuff's scale and other measures. Major findings in this study were: no significant differences were found on counseling skill improvement between the two groups, although a tendency showed that relational building skills were improved and variations of these skills were minimized among enrolled students after the training course was completed. A high positive correlation existed between counselor's confrontation skill, helpee's self-involvement, and counseling outcome. Counselor's and helpee's responses changed and moved toward higher scores on Carkhuff's scale and helpee's self-involvement scale within each counseling session. Similar results didn't show across counseling sessions. Finally, suggestions about providing counseling training program were addressed, defects in measurement and issues in conducting counseling research were raised.

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