CHAPTER VIII The Evaluation of Guidance and Personnel Services

A s THE GUIDANCE movement enters into its second half-century, there is general recognition of the need for evaluation of its services, but little evidence that the need is being met. Guidance services, like many others in education, are still offered largely on the bases of hope and faith. Cottle's statement (8) three years ago about the paucity of, and the great need for, co-operative and better-designed research is as apropos today as it was then. Only three books evaluating guidance services have been published during the 50 years since such services began, and one describing an extensive follow-up appeared during the period under review. (All other reports were brief articles in which the period covered from the applica-tion of the guidance service to its evaluation was relatively short.) In that book Rothney (34) described his attempt to assess vocational, educa-tional, and social activities of two groups at six months, two and one-half years, and five years after high-school graduation. The experimental group consisted of 343 subjects who had been counseled and who were compared with 342 members of a control group who had received no special counseling while they were in senior high school. The many find-ings of the research were summarized in his statement that counseling did 3eem to assist in the accomplishment of the objectives of the American secondary school. General discussions of the need for evaluation of guidance services appeared frequently, and some of them raised issues that should be con-sidered by evaluators. Patterson's discussion (27) of matching versus randomization in studies of counseling merited special attention. Callis, Polmantier, and Roeber (3) , in their summary of five years of research on counseling at the University of Missouri, raised some crucial questions. Coleman (6) listed 26 evaluative studies that he thought were needed