To address the need for tools assessing learning environments in counselor education, this session presents empirical findings from the development study of the Multicultural Social Justice-Oriented Learning Environment Scale. It also provides a comprehensive overview of each step in theory-driven scale development and validation. The session will also report evidence for content, structural, convergent, and predictive validities to demonstrate how to apply and interpret psychometric data.
This session introduces collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as a social justice research methodology and demonstrates its application through a study examining East Asian women international doctoral students’ academic job search experiences. Attendees will learn CAE procedures, trustworthiness strategies, and its strengths for centering marginalized voices. Five themes reveal intersecting systemic barriers. Implications for equitable hiring practices in counselor education will be discussed.
This session presents findings from a reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with nine counselor educators recognized as AI experts. We explore how educators navigate tensions between cognitive development and accessibility, address clinical readiness concerns, and implement intentional pedagogical strategies. Participants will learn evidence-based approaches to integrating AI into curriculum, supporting students, and developing institutional guidelines.
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.
Counselors are expected to develop diagnostic clinical reasoning skills that are culturally responsive, evidence-based, and ethically sound, yet counseling research continues to highlight gaps in how diagnostic competence is assessed. This session introduces a diagnostic decision-making model grounded in clinical reasoning, self-efficacy, and cultural humility. In addition, the federally funded program evaluation plan will be discussed, along with practice for experiential components.
Authorship is a common yet complex ethical issue in counseling research. This interactive session will explore professional standards, power dynamics, and practical strategies for determining authorship and order of authorship across collaborative teams. Through case discussion and guided reflection, attendees will develop skills to prevent and address authorship conflicts, promote transparency, and strengthen ethical and inclusive research collaboration.
Professional mentoring may support school counselors’ well-being and sustainability, yet existing measures offer limited applicability for research. This presentation describes the development and initial validation of the Mentoring Engagement Scale, a self-report measure of mentoring engagement. Results from 324 U.S. school counselors supported a two-factor structure—Investment and Impact—and demonstrated evidence of reliability and validity, with implications for research and practice.
CACREP requires doctoral students to receive faculty mentorship. Empirically we know the importance of this mentorship on researcher identity and that these benefits are greater when centering intersectional and cultural factors. However: how does this look practically? Our panel includes counselor educators who identify as female, Full Professors, at high research institutions. We’ll discuss our doctoral mentoring experiences rooted in research-informed strategies and intersectional feminism.
Anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies at the state and federal level have inhibited research participation among historically minoritized groups, who were already underrepresented in counseling research. In this roundtable, we will discuss barriers to participation in research for minoritized groups, present strategies from the literature for recruiting and retaining research participants from minoritized backgrounds, and collaborate on unique approaches for counseling research.
The RARE Model framework was originally designed to help reluctant faculty engage in program assessment. Counseling students often present with similar apprehensions and limiting beliefs when it comes to research: “I’m not a research person!” This session shows how the RARE Model can be applied in counselor education to foster confidence and support research identity development through intentional, practice-based strategies.
The public accessibility of data does not eliminate the researcher's obligation to protect the individuals represented within it. Through analysis of sample publications and pre-existing data, this presentation examines the ethical risks of using publicly accessible data in academic manuscripts and offers guidance for determining what should and should not be published. The session concludes with an applied exercise using the ethical frameworks presented.
As attachment theory is increasingly used in counseling, accurate assessment is essential. This session presents findings from a study of counseling students examining the convergent and discriminant validity of the primary attachment style questionnaire (PASQ) with measures of adult attachment and self-object needs. Results show borderline-secure styles actually reflect self-deficits more than attachment. Attendees will learn how these patterns inform the clinical use of attachment assessments.
