Assessment in Counseling: Procedures and Practices (6th Edition)

Description

Assessment in Counseling: Procedures and Practices, 6th Edition (Danica G. Hays)

Assessment is where counselling is most easily done badly. An instrument chosen for the wrong reason, a score read without its confidence interval, a result delivered to a client without context — each is a small failure with real consequences. This text, published by the American Counseling Association, is built to prevent those failures by grounding practice in measurement principles before it gets anywhere near a specific test.

What the Book Covers

• Foundations — core terminology, the history of assessment, and what assessment is actually for.
• The assessment process — from referral question to integrated conclusion.
• Ethical, legal and professional issues, and the assessment standards that govern practice.
• Statistics and measurement — scales of measurement, reliability, validity, correlation, test development, central tendency and variability, and raw score transformation.
• Initial assessment tasks — screening for mental health and substance use symptoms at the start of the counselling relationship.
• Types of assessment — career development, interests and values, interpersonal functioning, intelligence, achievement and aptitude.
• Communicating results — report writing and feeding findings back to clients in a form they can use.

Why Counsellors Keep It

• Published by the American Counseling Association, so it reflects the profession’s own standards rather than a generic testing perspective.
• Measurement taught for interpretation — enough statistics to read a manual critically, without turning into a statistics course.
• Integration is the through-line — the book repeatedly returns to combining test data with clinical interview and collateral information.

Who It Is For

• Counselling students taking an assessment or testing course in a CACREP-accredited programme.
• School counsellors, clinical mental health counsellors and career counsellors in practice.
• Candidates preparing for the NCE, NCMHCE or state licensure examinations.
• Supervisors teaching assessment competencies to trainees.

Book Details

• Title: Assessment in Counseling: Procedures and Practices
• Author: Danica G. Hays
• Edition: Sixth Edition
• Publisher: American Counseling Association
• Format: Paperback, 456 pages
• Language: English
• ISBN-13: 978-1556203688