Evaluation Capacity in K-12 School Counseling Programs

Abstract

The K-12 school counseling field continues to develop and implement Comprehensive, Developmental, Guidance and Counseling (CDGC) programs to organize services provided by school counselors. Given the program evaluation requirement to guide refinement and renewal efforts, enhancement of CDGC evaluation infrastructure is needed. This paper presents the results of a literature review, organized by the Milstein and Cotton (2000) evaluation capacity framework, detailing and analyzing the contextual factors and system features that impact the evaluation capacity of school counseling programs. The paper fills a need in the literature for more substantive work focused on evaluation capacity, particularly with respect to the school counseling field. The analytic approach is a test case that could be applied to the analysis of evaluation capacity in other settings.