Activities and Role of School Counselors in West Virginia: A Comparison to a National Sample

A national study of school counselor role and professional activities (Fan et al., 2019) was replicated using a West Virginia (WV) school counselor sample to determine if WV’s unique context and state policies would reflect a difference in how counselors perceive their roles and conduct professional practices. The comparison between WV sample and its national counterparts showed that school counselors grade level is robustly related to professional practice, with high school counselors demonstrating different levels of work focus than middle and elementary counselors. The WV sample did not demonstrate any practically significant differences from the previously collected national U.S. sample (Fan et al. 2019) on any ISSCA-US subsamples or items. While these results add confidence to the generalizability of Fan et al.’s (2019) findings, interestingly, no differences in role or practice were identified given the significant state policy initiatives to tailor school counseling practice towards state needs, models, and approaches

Development of the Taxonomy of Policy Levers to Promote High Quality School-Based Counseling: An Initial Test of its Utility and Comprehensiveness

This article is the second of a two-part series that describes the development of the Taxonomy of Policy Levers to Promote High Quality School-Based Counseling. A previous article (Morshed & Carey, in press) described the development of the Taxonomy using content analysis of existing published descriptions of policy levers used to promote quality school-based counseling. This present article tested the utility and comprehensiveness of the Taxonomy by having experts from South Korea, Nigeria, and West Virginia review policies in their regions.. They analyzed the utility and comprehensiveness of the Taxonomy by using it to describe the school-based counseling policy landscape in their own contexts. Overall, the Taxonomy provided a useful framework for identifying policy levers that were implemented as well as the levers which were not implemented but could be put in place to further improve school-based counseling. Four additional levers were added, and the revised Taxonomy is presented. Additional research to expand the taxonomy is suggested, and the utility of the taxonomy to guiding policy research and evaluation is explained