520 The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 4 despite its centrality in counselor education (Purgason et al., 2016), the literature on advising and the advisory relationship is scarce within counselor education. Since the publication of the 2016 CACREP Standards by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP; 2015), there has been increased attention to the advising process (Ng et al., 2019). Within counselor education, however, the extant literature on advising has focused on the responsibilities and priorities of the advisor (Knox et al., 2006) and neglected the processes involved in engaging in a “positive developmental relationship” (Ng et al., 2019, p. 54). Moreover, the focus of the literature also prioritizes advisement of doctoral students, overlooking the importance of appropriate advising for master’s students. Despite CACREP’s (2015) recommendations for programs to assign students in entry-level programs an advisor, few scholars have explored advising of master’s students in counseling programs. Instead, research has centered on the advising of master’s students pursuing doctoral studies (Farmer et al., 2017; Sackett et al., 2015). Still, these studies did not directly investigate the advisory process with master’s students in counseling programs, contributing to the widening gap between the limited scholarship focused on advising master’s students and the growing doctoral student advising literature. Recently, Rogers and colleagues (2020) discussed master’s students’ attachment, cognitive distortions, and experience of feedback in supervision. They discovered that attachment anxiety led to increased cognitive distortions, which further contributed to difficulty with corrective feedback during clinical supervision. Similar to feedback within supervisory relationships, advisors provide students with feedback during advising; therefore, it is important for faculty advisors to be aware of their advisees’ experiences of this process. As such, RCT provides a theoretical framework to strategically approach such situations with cognitive complexity and clinical sensitivity. Advising Approaches Generally, an advisor in higher education is typically a faculty member whose responsibility is to guide their advisees through their programs (Mu & Fosnacht, 2019; Ng et al., 2019). This is usually accomplished through implementation of one of three distinctive approaches to advising outlined by Crookston (1972/2009). The developmental approach is used to attend to students’ progress throughout their educational careers, making it holistic in nature. Through this approach, the advisor aims at assisting students in the exploration of career and life goals as well as teaching the necessary skills to reach these goals. The prescriptive advising approach, in which the role of the advisor is to provide information related to courses, policies, and logistics, may also be adopted. This advising approach is didactic; the advisor’s goal is to assist the advisee to meet their academic requirements, and the process is often initiated by the advisee. Finally, advisors may choose to use a proactive approach in which the advisor establishes a strong relationship with the advisee. The advisor leads the process and reaches out to the advisee during critical points and when the advisee may be at risk or belong to an underserved population. The goal is to provide additional support to the advisee (He & Hutson, 2017; Mu & Fosnacht, 2019). Although there have been no counselor education–specific advising theories put forth in the literature to date, the conceptual literature has been informed by mentoring enactment theory (Mansson & Myers, 2012), bioecological systems theory (Ng et al., 2019), and RCT (Hammer et al., 2014; Purgason et al., 2016). Moreover, despite McDonald’s (2019) contention of the centrality of theory-informed training for advisors, no research was identified that directly examined advising outcomes resulting from one theoretical approach or that addressed differences across the advising approaches most commonly used within counselor education, although current literature suggests the developmental approach is most widely used in higher education. This is evidenced by the shift away from prescriptive tasks and movement toward advancing career goals that align with advisees’ personhood (Kuo et al., 2017; McDonald, 2019). To date no studies have examined if this holds true
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