TPC Journal-Vol 10- Issue 3-FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 3 347 A final issue for consideration is the decision to use site supervisors as raters for the research. Site supervisors more commonly utilize the PDCA-R rather than the PDCA-RA, the version specific to admissions screening. The PDCA-R is used by supervisors to monitor and to communicate with counselor educators and counseling program clinical personnel. Further, at least one of the counselor education programs utilizes site supervisors for the admissions process. The training protocol for both versions of the PDCA is the same, and with site supervisors routinely participating in the training, the decision was made to include site supervisors as raters. It is possible, however, that site supervisors may differ in their abilities to respond to the training protocol when compared to counselor educators, adjunct faculty, and doctoral students. A possibility for future research is to measure the extent to which the improvement in reliability can be maintained over time. At this point, little is known about whether and how often educators and site supervisors would need training updates to function optimally as raters of student dispositions. Accordingly, rating reliability could be observed at intervals of 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year after training to monitor decay. Future research is also needed to determine the extent to which the length of the training protocol influences interrater reliability. In addition, cultural and gender bias in the use of the PDCA-RA should be studied, as one criticism of rubrics is the potential for cultural bias. As a tool for consistently rating counselor education program applicants, the PDCA-RA demonstrates potential, though more research needs to be conducted to increase the interrater reliability. Training improved the interrater reliability results but not to the extent that excellent interrater reliability was achieved. Adjusting the training protocol may be fruitful as a mechanism to improve interrater reliability. Conclusion There is a need for reliable admissions tools to assess dispositional behaviors of counseling program applicants. Interrater reliability is an important form of reliability in situations such as admissions interviews in which there are often multiple raters involved in the process. The importance of interrater reliability is founded in the critical premises of fairness and transparency to applicants, though legal protection of counselor education programs is also enhanced by using clear, standardized processes. Dispositional assessment is in its infancy, especially when applied to counselor education in general and to program admissions in particular. How exactly to define dispositions as well as how exactly the role of the counselor will serve as a means of selection and gatekeeping for the profession is yet to be determined. Yet counselor educators perceive both an ethical and professional responsibility for monitoring counseling student dispositions as a means for safeguarding the integrity of the profession (Freeman et al., 2019; Schuermann et al., 2018). The continued development of the PDCA-R and the PDCA-RA, as well as the associated training materials, represents initial steps toward standardizing and improving dispositional appraisal. The video-based training and the exploration of the training as a means of improving rater consistency will potentially increase the ability of counselor educators to consistently assess and monitor developing counseling students. Consistent dispositional ratings can also contribute to the development of a common language for discussing student progress. The current research represents a promising effort to continually improve the dispositions assessment process for counselor educators, counseling programs, and the counseling profession.