Purpose
An important objective of this counseling program is to provide opportunities for students to become consumers of research. One of the Skills listed on this course’s objectives found on the syllabus is for students to develop the ability to:
Read and critique professional journal articles in the field of Career Counseling
Learning how to read and understand research articles can further students’ professional development by improving their ability to recognize poor studies from effective studies. This is related to 2016 CACREP standard Section 2.F.8.a.:
“the importance of research in advancing the counseling profession, including how to critique research to inform counseling practice”
Task
Each student will identify, read, summarize and critique a research article from a professional journal in the field of career counseling. Consider the type of counseling you plan to practice and choose an article that could be useful to you in your own career counseling efforts. Be sure to choose a research article, not an opinion piece, literature review, or description of some technique or assessment instrument. Use the UTM library’s website to access articles.
You can use the UTM Library online to identify a journal article. A counseling specific search site has been developed by the library to help. One you open the following link, under “Resources by Type of Counseling” open the “Career” page. Choose one of the journals listed. Open an issue of your chosen journal. Read the table of contents and choose an article that interests you.:
Counseling Program Library GuideLinks to an external site.
https://libguides.utm.edu/counseling
The research study should include a hypothesis, dependent and independent variables, data collected, and an identifiable population. The article must be published in a refereed journal, not a newsletter, professional organization’s monthly magazine, or other non-research based publication.
The topic of the article must focus on Career Counseling, not the facts about a specific career itself. Be mindful of the journal you select. Journals like “The Career Development Quarterly” would be a great source.
Include reference information along with a website address or URL link to the article. In the body of your paper there are three portions: summary, critique of the research study, and a description of how the findings of the study will help you in your anticipated counseling role. A detailed explanation of the appropriate information for each part appears on the attached form. Try to be succinct and keep your summary and critique to three pages or less. DO NOT rewrite the entire journal article. It is your task to determine which information from the study is important to include in your paper
The article can be on a topic of your choice related to any chapter or subject in the career counseling course and from any appropriate professional journal including those in career development, counseling, education, business, human resources, or other fields. Pick a career topic in which you have an interest personally or professionally. The article must have been published within the past five years.
In your critique of the article include how you would benefit from the study as you conduct your own career counseling sessions. State the setting in which you plan to work (clinical mental health, or school counseling), the types of clients/students you plan to work with, and how the information in the article will influence your work with them.
Criteria
You will be graded on your choice of article (following the criteria listed above), ability to identify the specific elements of the research article (independent and dependent variables, hypotheses, description of the participants, sampling techniques, data/results, generalizability of the results), writing skills (grammar, coherence, punctuation, and spelling), AND ability to describe how you can benefit from the findings in the article to improve your own career counseling.
Use the following as a template for your critique:
Journal Article Critique Form (1).docxDownload Journal Article Critique Form (1).docx
Here is an example of a good journal critique:
Excellent Example Journal Article Critique.docxDownload Excellent Example Journal Article Critique.docx
Here is an example of a poorly chosen article and a poorly written paper:
Poor Example Journal Critique.docx
