Module 3
The ASCA Ethical Guideline A.3.e. states, “School Counselors: Deliver research-based interventions to help close achievement, attainment, information, attendance, discipline, resource, and opportunity gaps.” The profession has witnessed a significant change over the past twenty years in the amount of research conducted to identify evidence-based interventions.
At a personal level, your team is motivated to utilize evidence-based practices whenever possible because you value your students and believe they deserve the best interventions you can offer. In addition, team members want to spend more of their time providing interventions that have been identified as most likely to produce the results the team desires. Evidence-based interventions, therefore, have higher efficacy and are more efficient.
-
“Intervention” is a term typically used to describe an action taken to address an existing problem. In this module, the term intervention is more broadly used to describe the actions that counseling personnel may provide such as activities and programs that are a part of Tier I and II services, including counseling lessons, individual planning sessions to help students with their career and educational plans, and small or large group sessions for those who need academic, personal, and social and emotional support.
This broader use of “intervention” is consistent with usage in the pdf titled Identifying Evidence-Based School Counselor Interventions in which the Tier I Interventions provide a compilation of Primary Prevention programs, Tier II is a compilation of Secondary Prevention/Intervention strategies, and Tier III is the listing of Tertiary Prevention/ Intervention and Treatment strategies.
Education and the school counseling profession is witnessing a paradigm shift in the way evidence-based practice is being defined. There is also an increasing focus on interventions targeting system barriers in addition to the interventions helping individual students.
The Oregon Department of Education provides this definition: “Evidence-based” refers to forms of validation that do not just stem from dominant educational research but include community-driven, indigenous, Tribal, culturally-responsive /sustaining/specific, non-dominant and non-Western ways of knowing, being, and researching. Instructional practices, activities, strategies, or interventions that are “evidence-based” should not just privilege scientific evidence, but also be driven by evidence stemming from the perspectives of those affected by those practices, activities, strategies, or interventions.
Download the PowerPoint presented at the 2022 Evidence-Based School Counseling (EBSC) Conference by Brett Zyromski, PhD and Carey Dimmitt, PhD titled Evidence-Based School Counseling: An Evolving Paradigm. Slide 5 captures the essence of the paradigm shift of which Brett and Carey speak: Naming resources and barriers at both the systemic and student levels acknowledges the complexities of schools and reminds us to address how multidetermined human experiences really are, especially in complex institutions like schools. It also reminds us of the importance in humanizing our systems to better see and respond to the needs of the school community and take a step back to make sure our policies, programs and practices are not holding students accountable for a situation they did not create and that they don’t have the institutional power to shift. With this lens, EBSC = multi-faceted system work + student-level work.
An additional resource is Dawn Horton and Cat Griffith’s 2022-23 review of cutting edge school-based intervention.
-
Spend time acquainting yourself with the document Identifying Evidence-Based School Counseling Interventions EBSCC 2019 that you download in this module. The authors provide information (p. 4-8) about what is required for an intervention to be classified as an evidence-based intervention and the resources they used to conduct their search for the interventions. They then present the levels of intervention: Tier I, Tier II, and Tier III they use in categorizing the interventions (p. 9-11). The remainder of this document presents Tier I, Tier II, Tier III evidence-based interventions categorized by ASCA Domain.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) provides evidence-based interventions in social-emotional learning, which is overviewed on pages 13-16. Your team may want to spend additional time familiarizing yourself with the resources provided by CASEL. Then plan to stay updated through the Oregon Department of Education’s SEL webpage to support school districts in their implementation of the Transformative SEL Framework and Standards by July 1, 2024. Your team will want to begin considering how the implementation of the Transformative SEL Framework and Standards will be addressed in your comprehensive school counseling plan.
You are invited to explore the Center for School Outcome Research and Evaluation (CSCORE) site. CSCORE is one of the best resources related to school counseling research for school counselors and school counselor educators. You are also encouraged to consider attending the annual Evidence-Based School Counseling Conference. At this conference you will hear school counselors present on the interventions they are using and the data they collect to assess the efficacy of their intervention.
If your team is unable to find an intervention in the Identifying Evidence-Based School Counseling Interventions document, you may want to check The Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development that lists youth development programs that have scientific support.
The School Social Work Association of America compiled resources to assist in locating evidence-based practices for assessment, intervention, prevention and screening.
Program Development Template Module 3
The Evidence-Based School Counseling Interventions document and the other sources of evidence-based research contain a significant amount of information. What might your counseling leadership team do to maintain the team’s focus on utilizing evidence-based practices and continue to utilize the information on evidence-based practices?
Now indicate the evidence-based intervention chosen to achieve each of the stated program outcomes. If an intervention was chosen and it does not have an evidence-base, what was the process utilized to choose the intervention?