Microskills Practice Versus Mental Practice Training for Competence in Decision-Making Counseling
Students enrolled in an introductory counseling course who lacked training and experience as counselors were randomly assigned to one of two decisionmaking counseling training groups or to a wait-control (WC) group. Microskills practice (MS) and mental practice (MP) were each separately combined with instructions, modeling, feedback, and review in the two treatment groups. All trainees conducted posttraining simulated counseling interviews, and their videotapes provided data for analysis of the quality of their counseling competence and their proficiency with the decision-making counseling paradigm. Multivariate analysis of variance and follow-up analyses of data from independent ratings of the videotapes indicated that MS and MP were superior to WC on three of five qualitative dimensions and a proficiency measure. Implications for teaching higher-order counseling skills are discussed, and further research hypotheses are suggested. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of microskills practice (MS) and mental practice (MP) on acquisition of decision-making counseling competence. Counseling psychology knows more about teaching lower-order skills such as attending and responding than about teaching higher-order skills such as decisionmaking and test-interpretation counseling (Kasdorf & Gustafson, 1978). Research in this area is important so that we may learn whether practice methods that work with lower-order skills are also effective in teaching higher-order skills (Fuqua & Gade, 1982) and so that we can assess the cost effectiveness of comparative methods, especially where training group size increases and length of training time decreases. Earlier research validates the effect of microskills practice on acquisition of lower-order skills (cf. Kasdorf & Gustafson, 1978). In addition, Baker, Scofield, Munson, and Clayton (1983) found mental practice equal to microskills practice on a qualitative counseling measure and superior in teaching basic responding skills after a brief (150 min) training program. One effort to teach decision-making counseling skills led to the conclusion that a comprehensive format of lecture, instructions, modeling, practice, and feedback was superior to subsets of the same components (Wallace, Horan, Baker, & Hudson, 1975). Knowledge about the importance of in