TPC Journal V8, Issue 2 - FULL ISSUE

172 The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 2 Efforts to pursue research related to both foci presented above can benefit from more sophisticated SCRDs and more temporally flexible experimental interventions. More sophisticated designs can enhance the internal validity of SCRD studies. For example, multiple baseline designs (e.g., A-B-A-B) provide for multiple relevant outcomes and increased data points (e.g., A-B-A-B-A-B), and allow researchers to replicate the intervention effects within one study (Lenz, 2015). Also, a combination of statistical and visual data analyses will enhance the probability of finding trends when they are difficult to see visually. Recommendations for Practice Recommendations for serving foster care youth herein might be generalizable to some extent for serving all youth. The individual student planning component of the ASCA National Model (2012) will be a useful framework for customizing interventions, providing ongoing activities that will help students with goal setting and planning for the future, and developing learning and graduation plans. Furthermore, school counselors can use appraisal and advisement strategies to enhance career and college readiness by helping students to evaluate their own interests, skills, and abilities in order to make informed decisions about their future (ASCA, 2012). School counselors are encouraged to create support and educational programming for students in foster care. Because multiple foster care placement switches may serve as an impediment to high school completion and, overall, cause a disruption to educational progression, school counselors are challenged to organize career and college readiness programming that will permit foster care youth to receive a satisfactory amount of information regardless of when they arrive at their schools. School counselors may also engage in and coordinate legislative or policy-level advocacy efforts by organizing social and political advocacy endeavors, such as a legislative day, that tackle the educational needs of foster care youth and assemble individuals to get involved in these efforts. Counselors in the schools can accomplish this goal through participation in either state- or national- level counseling-specific organizations. Community and school counselors can collaborate with stakeholders to familiarize foster care youth with programs that will aid them with their transition into institutions of postsecondary education. They can acquaint themselves with programs geared toward providing postsecondary education services to both current and former foster care youth who are in college. College counselors can create support groups for adolescents aging out of foster care that address and normalize the transition challenges they face, provide academic and personal support services and resources, and help incoming students build community in their new environment. Furthermore, counselor educators can inform their students about the career and college readiness self-efficacy construct and how multiple barriers impact the postsecondary education aspirations of all students. In so doing, they also can include career and college readiness enhancement strategies for working with underserved student populations within their course curriculums. Counselors in school, community, and college settings can contribute to enhancing the postsecondary education access of foster care youth specifically, and all youth generally. In so doing, counselors often find themselves providing individualized student planning or counseling services. Within the broad context of career and college readiness, individual student clients, including foster care youth, present varied access circumstances that challenge counselors to customize their responsive services in order to address situation-specific needs.