DIGEST - Volume 10, Issue 3-FULL DIGEST

8 TPC Digest ne of the distinctive marks in the development of a profession is the ability to self-regulate. As such, dispositional assessment and monitoring is becoming widely accepted among the various mental health and human service disciplines as being an important component of ensuring client safety and safeguarding professional standards. Counseling professionals responded to the calls from the 2009 and 2016 CACREP standards to develop assessment techniques for monitoring student dispositions. Counselor education departments responded to this call by developing assessment techniques for documenting student dispositional development, including responses to remediation and interventions. T he Professional Disposition Competence Assessment (PDCA) was developed as a system for documenting and monitoring counselor student dispositions. The PDCA has been revised based on initial psychometric data and now includes observational rubrics for screening students at admissions (Professional Disposition Competence Assessment—Revised Admission; PDCA-RA) and for monitoring student dispositional development throughout their program (Professional Disposition Competence Assessment—Revised; PDCA-R).These dispositional assessment rubrics are unique in that psychometric data has been reported on their reliability and validity. One of the measurement issues that is of crucial importance to rubric development is interrater reliability. Realizing this, the developers of the PDCA developed a training video designed to increase the interrater reliability of the instrument. The video-based training system takes about two hours to complete and is appropriate for small group settings. The advantage of the video-based training system is that the use of video recordings is easy to distribute and ensures that each training protocol experience is similar in content. For this study, 70 counselor educators, site supervisors, and doctoral students were pretested in their use of the PDCA-RA. They then received training and were posttested with a similar task of rating students using the PDCA-RA rubric. Several statistical techniques were used to compare the interrater reliability and agreement of the pretest raters with the same for posttest raters. Results suggested that the training improved rater agreement from “moderate” to “good” levels of agreement. T his study fits well with previous literature documenting the development of the PDCA-RA, including the reporting of psychometric properties for the instrument. The study suggested that the PDCA-RA shows promise as a tool for monitoring student dispositions, in compliance with calls from counseling standards of practice. The study also debuted a video-based training system that, when used in conjunction with the PDCA-RA, increased interrater reliability to acceptable levels. This tool could be used as a component of a system for dispositional monitoring of counselor education students beginning at admissions and continuing throughout their counselor education program. The dispositional monitoring system could represent one way of responding to calls from CACREP to monitor student dispositions at multiple points across their counselor education program. Curtis Garner, EdD, NCC, NCSC, LCPC, is a professor and department chair at Gonzaga University. Brenda Freeman, PhD, is a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Roger Stewart, PhD, is a professor at Boise State University. Ken Coll, PhD, is the Dean of the School of Education at the University of Nevada, Reno. Correspondence may be addressed to Curtis Garner, 502 East Boone Ave., Spokane, WA 99258-0102, garnerc@gonzaga.edu. Curtis Garner, Brenda Freeman, Roger Stewart, Ken Coll Assessment of Dispositions in Program Admissions | T i st O The Professional Disposition Competence Assessment—Revised Admission (PDCA-RA)