The Psychometric Properties of the School Counseling Internship Competency Scale

Counselor education programs aim to adequately train competent pre-service counselors to fulfill a myriad of roles and responsibilities associated with their specialty area. In accordance with professional organizations, gatekeeping is an ethical responsibility of counselor educators and supervisors to protect the welfare of clients and the health of the counseling profession through ongoing evaluation of pre-service counselors. Presently, no standardized evaluation tool exists to assess school counseling interns comprehensively, attending to school counseling competencies, dispositions, roles, and responsibilities. The purpose of the study is to attend to the gap in literature through the creation and validation of The School Counseling Internship Competency Scale (SCICS). This study utilized an exploratory sequential mixed method approach with qualitative inquiry to create the instrument and exploratory factor analysis to determine the latent factor structure with 230 university and site school counseling supervisors. Data analysis revealed that the 48-item instrument accounted for 65.5% variance explained by a five-factor solution. Sub-scales included Direct Services and Data-Driven Practices, Academic Advising and Special Education Process, Collaboration and Consultation with Stakeholders, Cultural Competence and Advocacy, and Professional Dispositions and Behaviors. The SCICS has strong internal consistency as well as evidence for content, factorial, convergent, concurrent, and incremental validity. Implications for school counselor education, university and site supervisors, pre-service school counselors, and the school counseling profession are included