Counseling faculty will review the program syllabi for the research and group counseling courses to make certain that CACREP standards and NCE objectives are included in the courses. While the mean scores in these two areas were not significantly lower than the mean scores of students in other CACREP programs (research: SHSU 9.00, other programs 9.35; group counseling: SHSU 13.00, other programs 13.13), the faculty want student scores to improve in these two areas. Faculty teaching COUN 5385 and COUN 6376 will implement more role-playing, demonstrations, and counseling videos into the courses to help students improve awareness and skillls in the three areas students were assigned a score of 3 by supervisors on the Site Supervisor Evaluation Form. Our students will be required to prepare all reports, abstracts, and written projects following APA manuscript guidelines in order to give them more practice and knowledge of APA rules and guidelines for scholarly writing. Students enrolled in more intensive research courses (COUN 5379, COUN 5334, COUN 5392, and COUN 6332 will be expected to read multiple articles on a given topic and synthesize results and significant information for the articles utilizing the new Literature Review Rubric. Students in COUN 5379 will read and critique articles in professional journals using quantitative research methodology prior to beginning their own quantitative research project and make weekly visits to the SHSU writing center if they demonstrate less that graduate level writing skills.

Counseling faculty prepared a self-study for renewal of CACREP accreditation. During this process, all counseling course syllabi were updated to reflect student learning outcomes in compliance with new CACREP standards. An APA Grading Rubric and APA Guidelines Assignment were developed to help students focus on specific guidelines that students enrolled in the graduate counseling program are expected to know and prepare papers demonstrating correct application of these guidelines. A revised Literature Review Rubric was shared with students enrolled in Research Methods course, COUN 5379.

All of the counseling courses required by a CACREP accredited program as well as the counseling elective courses have been revised to aligned with the new CACREP standards. Therefore, faculty are confident that students in our program will be prepared for the NBCC Examination as well as develop assessment/diagnostic skills, and research competencies as required by the quality standards of CACREP. However, with a 96% pass rate for the NBCC Examiantion for this past year, our faculty are pleased that our program is preparing students to obtain licensure in the state of Texas as a Community Mental Health Counselor.