Practices, perceptions, and professsional developmental needs of guidance counselors concerning secondary career and technical education students’ postsecondary transition goals

Abstract

This study focused mainly on high school guidance counselors’ development of career and technical education (CTE) students’ transition plans from secondary to postsecondary education. The Pre-college Guidance and Counselor program developed by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) was used to guide the development of the instrument, especially transition practices associated with postsecondary education. The School Counselor Postsecondary Education Survey (SCPES) for CTE students was developed. The population of the study was high school guidance counselors in Georgia. According to a 2007 state roster list, the population contained 1,152 high school guidance counselors. Through a simple random sampling (SRS), instruments were e-mailed to 576 participants or 50% of the original population. A total of 233 valid responses were returned providing a response rate of 40.45%. The factors examined were (a) practice, (b) perception of practice, and (c) need for professional development. Reliability analysis was completed for the subscales of the SCPES. Additional information compared each of the research questions by using ANOVA to test for differences between different groupings of respondents. The open-ended responses were analyzed by repeatedly reading the responses and grouping the responses into categories using phenomenological analysis techniques