Introduction

This assignment is designed to provide you with an opportunity to apply data results and analysis to an evaluation of your intervention outcomes. All comprehensive school counseling programs are expected to be evidence based and data driven.

For this assignment, you will be able to be a little bit creative and improvise as needed. You will use real datasets, but you are not expected to run an actual intervention. Instead, you get an opportunity to imagine you ran the best evidence-based intervention and that it worked. Your students gained academically!

How you decide to show your measurements is up to you. For example, if you want to say you used pre- and post-test assessments or if you decide to review data over multiple years, you get to decide what would be best for your goals and your program. You may want to keep it realistic, as this will be expected of you as a school counselor, but you can have some fun with this part of the assignment.

Instructions

For this assignment:

1. Explain the need for program evaluation in a CSCP. This will take about one page to write.
2. Describe how you decided to implement the school counseling evidence-based interventions (i.e., the school counseling core curriculum lesson(s) and one additional evidence-based intervention) that addressed academic outcomes. For example, for the core curriculum component, was your intervention conducted in a single lesson or across a series of lessons? How many students were involved? For your additional intervention, if you decided to intervene with small group counseling, how often did you meet with the students, for how long, and with what expected outcome? This will take about one page to write. Remember, you are creating some information for this section as if you actually conducted the interventions in a school setting.
3. Describe the evaluation plan that you will use to show the effectiveness of your program. This section should go beyond a general definition of why program evaluation is important. Instead, it should specifically describe the way in which data will be used to measure effectiveness for the interventions you proposed. You should include definitions and specific examples of process, perception, and outcome data you will incorporate in your program evaluation.
4. Organize and review your data. Consider trends, increases, decreases, gender disparities, changes in scores, and so forth (see page 91 of your Facilitating Evidence-Based, Data-Driven School Counseling text). For example, you might use an Excel spreadsheet with either real data or data from a source provided in the Facilitating Evidence-Based, Data-Driven School Counseling text. Play around with this part of the assignment, as it will help prepare you for your final assignment in Week 9. The more you practice working with data now, the better off you will be for Week 9.
5. Evaluate the school counseling intervention based on your selected data. For example, how many students were served? What was their perception of change? What was the outcome on their academic goals? Again, you may invent school demographics and population data. This last step will take between one and two pages to write.

Note: Remember to carefully review the grading criteria before you begin the assignment.