School engagement predicts academic and long-term outcomes, yet contextual influences are often overlooked. Grounded in Ecological Social Justice School Counseling, an SDOH-informed framework, this study uses adolescent data from the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Using SEM, links between SDOH and engagement, mediation by parent relationships, and demographic differences are explored. Findings underscore systemic inequities and offer implications for school counseling practice.
This session applies Boyer’s Four Functions of Scholarship—discovery, integration, application, and teaching—to counseling and counselor education. Presenters invite attendees to consider broader, more inclusive understandings of scholarly work and to explore ways counseling programs can recognize and reward diverse forms of knowledge production. Strategies for successfully promoting one’s integrative, applied, or pedagogical scholarly pursuits will be shared.
This mixed methods study evaluated Hope Matters, a school counselor–led group intervention grounded in Snyder’s hope theory. Using a pre–post–follow-up test design with 135 students (grades 3–7), results showed significant increases in hope, but no improvements in attendance, grades, or discipline referrals. Interviews with six counselors identified key themes that influenced implementation. Participants will learn the hope intervention and how to apply a mixed methods approach to evaluation
This session will provide an overview of a newly released textbook entitled “Neuroscience-Integrated Assessment in Counseling: Culturally Responsive Practices and Procedures” with the design for graduate-level instruction for counselor education. Using a mixture of informative and interactive ways, the co-authors will use a case study(s) from the text to invite the audience to conduct a smaller group exercise designed to practice the application of the text to teaching an assessment course.
This presentation explores how student-to-school counselor ratios influence student outcomes, including performance on standardized math and English assessments, chronic absenteeism, high school graduation, and college enrollment. The presenter examines how these effects vary across different contexts. Emphasis is placed on the role of school counselors in supporting student development across academic, career, and social/emotional domains.
This presentation will focus on how to conduct a multiple time points (i.e., longitudinal) counseling research study. The presenters will discuss how to conceptualize a study, receive institutional review board approval, collect and analyze data, and disseminate findings. A longitudinal study on counselor well-being will be provided with results analyzed using structural equation modeling. Attendees will leave with knowledge to generate their own longitudinal study.
This presentation evaluates the utility of the Sporting Resilience Model (Gupta & McCarthy, 2022) among collegiate student-athletes. A hierarchical multiple regression is used to examine the unique and incremental variance explained by 10 biopsychosocial protective factors and their relative contributions to resilience. Findings will inform assessment practices, higher education programming, intervention development, and outcome monitoring to enhance student-athlete performance and well-being.
