More Statistics!

I don't really enjoy talking about statistics, so I'm choosing to share my reflection from last weeks class.

We had the privilege to Skype in with a current master-giver of assessments. This experience was really neat and interesting for me. I have never heard about the process of administering an assessment to a client in the way she shared with us, especially the parts when she talked to us about the assessment reports we were able to work with earlier in the semester. While I don't think I will be getting into the testing and assessment field anytime soon, I do know that I will be working with school psychologists and social workers who may conduct assessments on students of mine. In fact, that just happened yesterday at my internship site! I was able to hear about the assessment reports for one of my students who was being tested for SPED services. I was able to appreciate the reports a little bit more after our experience last class because I know how much of a difference assessments make!

Test Worthiness

Reading this week's chapter reminded me of the beginning of last summer. When I think of summer I always think about tanning in the sun, warm days that turn into long nights, and fresh fruit by the pool. While this chapter didn't make me think about any of these wonderful things, it did make me think about how I started last summer with a class on statistics. This class was interesting due to the fact that it was being taught to a bunch of counselors and I kept thinking "how is this relevant to me as a school counselor?"

My question was answered after a few weeks into the class when our professor explained to us that all she wants us to do at the end of the course is to be able to understand how to read research journals in their entirety. Now I can thank my statistics professor for pushing that on us because I am reading more journals now than I was at the beginning of my program and knowing how to read them is a huge skill to have. I am now able to carry this skill over to my work with assessments. 

The Assessment Report

Reading up on the assessment report process wasn't very intriguing to me since I won't be doing clinical intakes in my job as a School Counselor. However, I was interested in the form of an unstructured interview process as a way to talk to students who may come in to see me with certain concerns or issues, such as academic problems in the classroom. 

While I will not be writing up a formal report like the ones discussed in the reading, I may have to read over some that come my way from outside counselors, the School Psychologist, the Social Worker, or the Special Education teacher. Knowing how to read the report is the most important take away from the chapter this week for me.

Diagnosis in the Assessment Process

This weeks reading focused heavily on the DSM-V and how this tool is used in the field of Mental Health. Luckily, from being fresh out of the Psychopathology course from last semester, I am very familiar with the DSM-V. However, I am not, and probably never will be, familiar with diagnosing individuals who come in for treatment. This is mainly because I won't have the knowledge, expertise, or qualification to diagnose clients and, secondly, because I don't want to have that responsibility. I am going to be a School Counselor and, as you know, School Counselors are unable to diagnosis students - although I'm sure there are SC's out there who have diagnoses made up in their minds about certain students who present to them distinct qualities that fit into a disorder in the DSM-V.

Anyways, back to the assessment piece of this chapter. While I believe that assessing patients and clients is completely necessary before actually diagnosing them with a disorder of some sort, I highly hope that these assessments are reliable, valid, and cross-culturally relevant. The chapter touches on the fact that there are some ethnicities who are over- or under-diagnosed in certain circumstances. This scares me because there are lots more ethnicities in our nation than the ones the DSM-V caters to, which is a white American. As the Mental Health field continues to grow and learn, I hope that the instruments we use to assess individuals for mental disorders also continue to grow and develop in a more culturally accepting way.