NO SCHOOL COUNSELOR LEFT BEHIND: COUNSELORS USE OF DATA AND THEIR PERCEIVED OBSTACLES AND FACILITATORS

Open Access
- Author:
- (Reish) Miller, Billie J
- Graduate Program:
- Counselor Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 13, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Richard Hazler, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Richard Hazler, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Edgar Paul Yoder, Committee Member
Jolynn Carney, Committee Member
Jerry G Trusty, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Facilitators; Obstacles; data usage; counselors use of data; Love's 4 Conditions of Data-based Decision Making; DBDM
- Abstract:
- Legislation such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) of 2001 created a situation where schools use data to track and monitor student success. Counselors are now being held to those same expectations that teachers and administrators have been since the NCLB legislation. Through this descriptive study, the obstacles and facilitators were explored by asking school counselors their perceived impact on their use of data in their counseling program. 406 school counselors from the ASCA membership directory reported how much they use data in their programs, in what ways do they use those data, and what factors they believe impede and facilitate their use of data. Love’s 4 Conditions of Data-based Decision Making were also explored. The primary research question for this study was, how do school counselors involved in RAMP Data Teams, Non-RAMP Data Teams, and those not involved in data teams (No Data Teams) differ on factors surrounding their use of data? The highest impeding obstacles reported were time, availability to data teams, and data use culture. The highest facilitative ratings reported were data skills, importance of data and access to data. The hypothesized results were partially confirmed. These results demonstrated that both RAMP and Non-RAMP Data Team Counselors were significantly higher than No Data Team Counselors on Love’s 4 Conditions of Data-based Decision Making and the Facilitator-Obstacle Index. This suggests that being part of a data team might be as important or more important than RAMP itself on counselors’ data usage. Only Non-RAMP Data Team Counselors were significantly higher on their frequency of data usage. Non-RAMP Data Team Counselors reported using data on a weekly basis compared to RAMP Data Team Counselors and No Data Team Counselors using data on a monthly basis. Participation on a data team appears to have a positive influence on data usage. Implications for practice and recommendations for future research are presented.