Week 12

            Drummond & Jones (2010) assert that counselors are actively involved in administering, scoring, and interpreting a variety of assessments in schools, and go on to list particular assessments: career, needs assessments, standardized achievement tests.  They also contend that teachers and administrators rely on counselors as a resource of information about assessments instruments and results.  Anastasi (1992) asserts that counselors play a major role in psychological testing.  To be completely honest, either the counselors in my school are not doing their job, or it is simply not this way in my district.  Throughout the course we have read and learned about the active role that counselors take in assessment, but in my experience that has been the school psychologist’s job.  The counselors in my school are responsible for Career Cruising assessments, but they do not personally have access to nor keep a record of students’ results.  In addition, they proctor the PSSA tests for students who need extra time.  Our students take the 4sight tests, which are benchmark assessments to gauge student growth throughout each year, but the counselors are not involved in scoring nor interpreting these assessments; that is the job of the reading and math teachers.  They later state, from the Ekstrom et al (2004) study, that “Middle school counselors spend more time designing or adapting assessment instruments for use in planning or evaluating school counseling programs, as well as reading professional literature about assessment.”  That seems much more realistic as to what I understand of the counselors’ jobs at my school.

            It was interesting to read further into the discrepancy model of determining learning disabilities.  While I have known that a learning disability is present if there is a discrepancy between a student’s ability and achievement, I did not realize that it was, specifically if there are 1 to 1.5 standard deviations between the scores.  I do agree that this model can be a “wait to fail” approach; however, many times, when a student scores low enough, they are given a label of Other Health Impairment and still given special education services.  If this is not the case, schools have become so differentiated that students who are lower achieving are often placed in more supported classes anyway.  Again, reading this section I cannot help but wonder if my school is using best practices.  I am about 95% positive that psychologists still use the discrepancy model to identify students with learning disabilities (although if I am wrong that could be due to my oblivion of my Special Ed world of already-identified students).  Interventions are almost always a must in order for a student to be considered for testing; the only exception I know of is if the evaluation is due to parents’ request. Drummond & Jones (2010) state that there is “not universally accepted approach” of RTI, and I definitely see this in my school.  I believe administrators, counselors, psychologists, etc. are still implementing a more well-defined system.

            I learned a few new tid-bits when reading this chapter.  I had never heard of the SPLASH test strategy (Drummond & Jones, 2010), and I can see that such an acronym could be useful for students.  With so many components to this acronym, I think it would be more useful for high school students.  I have also never heard of environmental assessments, let alone seen one personally.  It slightly worries me that research from 1977 is used as the basis of such assessments, since schools (students, curriculum, laws, society in general) have changed so greatly.  One of the most unfortunate changes is the implementation of NCLB and the focus on standardized assessments (PSSAs and Keystones) as a means to measure student success.  I could write pages on my feelings about this topic, but I think perhaps the most accurate and powerful statement was made by Drummond & Jones (2010): “High-stakes testing has created an atmosphere of greed, fear, and stress in schools, none of which contribute to learning.”

References

Anastasi, A. (1992).  What counselors should know about the use and interpretation of psychological 

            tests.  Journal of Counseling & Development, 70, 610-615.

Drummond, R. J. and Jones, K. (2010). Assessment procedures for counselors and

            helping professionals. (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.