| Abstract |
- In the 1961-62 academic year there were thirteen National
Defense Education Act Counseling and Guidance Training Institutes
established at institutions of higher education about the country.
The purpose of these institutes was to upgrade the counseling and
guidance skills of personnel employed as half-time counselors in
secondary schools. As a part of the evaluation process of these
institutes, students were administered a number of tests at the beginning
and at the end of the institute experience. One of these
evaluative tools was the Strong Vocational Interest Blank for Men.
Three problems were investigated. The first was to determine
the effect of the intensive Counseling and Guidance Training
Institute program on the Institute enrollees' interests as measured
by the Strong Vocational Interest Blank. The second was to determine
if there were common interest patterns among the enrollees.
The third problem was to investigate the relationship between
interest patterns and the enrollees' ratings of success in counseling
by Institute staff.
In this study it was hypothesized that the intensive nature of
the institute experience would cause marked shifts in interest patterns
on the part of the enrollees. These shifts would be toward
Group V, Welfare and Social Service, Group VIII, Administrative
Detail, and Group X, Communications, and away from Group I,
Biological Science, Group II, Physical Science, Group III, Technical,
and Group IX, Sales. It was also expected that enrollees would have
common profile patterns on admission to the institute, and that
these profile patterns would be especially similar for those who had
been grouped in the top, average, or low rated group of enrollees.
Using the t-test of mean differences, it was found that there
were no statistically significant differences at acceptable levels of
confidence between the interest patterns of enrollees from the pretest
to the post-test administration of the Strong Vocational Interest
Blank. In addition, there were no common profile patterns among
the enrollees on admission to the institute, nor were there any
common interest patterns among those who were rated by staff as
being in the top, average, or low group of enrollees. Approximately
63 percent of the enrollees had a primary interest pattern in the
social service area. Thirty-six percent had primary interest
patterns in administrative detail, and all of the other primary pattern
groups contained less than 30 percent of the enrollees. Likewise,
61 percent of the enrollees had reject patterns in Group II,
Physical Science, while 34 percent had a reject pattern in Group VI,
Musician, and Group I, Biological Science. There were no significant
changes in interest pattern profiles from the pre-test to the
post-test and there were no significant differences in the profile
patterns of those in the top-rated, low-rated, or average groups of
enrollees.
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