Using the Self-Directed Search: Career Explorer with high-risk middle school students

Career Development Quarterly, March, 2006 by Debra S. Osborn, Robert C. Reardon

The Self-Directed Search: Career Explorer was used with 98 (95% African American) high-risk middle school students as part of 14 structured career groups based on Cognitive Information Processing theory. Results and implications are presented on the outcomes of this program.

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With increasing pressure on middle school students to make preliminary decisions that will have an impact on their future careers, such as identifying an educational track to follow in high school, the need for valid and reliable career testing and career counseling for this age group is becoming more evident. Although many articles (Gottfredson, 2002; Rayman & Atanasoff, 1999; Reardon & Lenz, 1999) have focused on the use of the Self-Directed Search with high school students, college students, and adults, very few studies have focused on the utility of the middle school version, the Self-Directed Search: Career Explorer (SDS:CE; Holland & Powell, 1994), or how it might be incorporated into a career counseling program for students at risk of dropping out of school. Finding a valid and reliable tool to use in an efficient, theoretically based approach was our goal.

The first goal was to use the SDS:CE version and accompanying interpretive report with high-risk middle school students. A second goal was to explore the use of these tools within a structured group counseling approach based on Cognitive Information Processing (CIP) career theory (Peterson, Sampson, Lenz, & Reardon, 2002) as the organizing framework.

Program Description

On the basis of general group counseling principles and CIP theory (Peterson et al., 2002), a 6-week, 30 minutes-per-session group format was used. CIP theory includes four main career choice components: knowledge about self, knowledge about options, decision making, and metacognitions (how one thinks about one's decision making). During Session 1, members of the group introduced themselves, received information about confidentiality, and completed the SDS:CE. Beginning with Session 2, 1 week was allowed per CIP component; Session 6 focused on group closure.

In Session 2, students' SDS:CE interpretive reports were returned to the students and discussed. Students narrowed their options by crossing off unattractive occupations, highlighting those for further consideration, and placing a question mark next to occupations for which they needed additional information or were unsure. Students wrote a reason for crossing off a particular occupation beside the ones they eliminated. In Session 3, students met in the media center and were shown how to use various Internet-based career information sites, such as the online Occupational Outlook Handbook (U.S. Department of Labor, 2006), to help narrow options from their SDS:CE interpretive reports further and increase occupational knowledge. Session 4 focused on decision making, and Session 5 addressed self-talk through a modified board game.

The SDS:CE (Holland & Powell, 1994) was chosen because of its psychometric properties and appropriateness for use with students at the middle school level. The computer-based SDS:CE interpretive report (Reardon & PAR Staff, 1994), based on their SDS:CE results, was provided to the students. In a study conducted by Jones, Sheffield, and Joyner (2000), middle school students responded favorably to the SDS:CE. Others (O'Brien, Dukstein, Jackson, Tomlinson, & Kamatuka, 1999) have found that students' confidence in the career decision-making process increased and occupations that were more congruent were selected after a 1-week career program that included taking the SDS:CE. The SDS:CE has high reliability, with K-R 20 coefficients above .91 for each summary scale (Holland, Powell, & Fritzsche, 1994).

Ninety-eight students from a public middle school located in the southeastern United States returned permission forms to be included in career counseling groups (14 groups total) and to participate in research. Ninety-one students (41 boys, 50 girls) completed the SDS:CE in its entirety; the majority of the students (95%) were African American and on free/reduced-price lunch programs. This middle school was the recipient of a 5-year GEAR-UP grant to increase the number of middle school students who stay in school and to encourage them to obtain some type of postsecondary training. Case workers associated with the GEAR-UP program identified students participating in this study as being at risk for dropping out of school because of poor attendance, low grades, high number of discipline referrals, or a combination of those factors.

One-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted to determine the presence of significant mean differences. In addition, reliability analyses for the six scales were also conducted, and Pearson product-moment correlations were performed on the summary scales.

Results

The most common primary Holland (1997) codes by gender for these middle school students were Artistic (n = 13, 32%) and Realistic (n = 10, 24%) for boys and Social (n = 19, 73%) and Artistic (n = 16, 32%) for girls. An ANOVA revealed significant differences for two types: Realistic, F(1, 89) = 21.85, p < .0001; and Social, F(1, 89) = 4.95, p < .05. Boys had higher mean scores on the Realistic scale (M = 22.83, SD = 13.70) compared with girls (M = 11.78, SD = 8.56), whereas girls had higher Social scale scores (M = 30.84, SD = 11.80) compared with boys (M = 25.38, SD = 11.30). More detailed information and tables are available in Osborn and Reardon (2004).