Peterson & Nisenholz (1994) define school counseling as a profession that focuses on the relations and interactions between students and their school environment with the expressed purpose of reducing the effect of environmental and institutional barriers that impede student academic success. The profession is said to be one in which counselors work to foster conditions that ensure educational equity, access, and academic success for all students K-12.
To accomplish the foregoing function, the trained school counselor must be an assertive advocate creating opportunities for all students to nurture dreams of high aspirations. This paper reviews five articles relevant to a variety of areas salient for school counseling. Each article is briefly summarized and then discussed in terms of its applications to the school counseling situation.
Article 1: Predictors of Educational and Occupational Aspirations
In this study of a large national sample of students, Mau and Bikos (2000) examined for several personal/psychological, demographic (sex and race), family, and school variables as predictors of students (10th and 12th grade) educational and occupational aspirations. The student sample was drawn from the large database of the National Educational Longitudinal study sponsored by the National Center for Educational Statistics. Logistic multiple regression analyses revealed several findings. First, it was observed that both educational and occupational aspirations increased for all students; however, educational and occupational aspirations were highest for Asian students and the lowest for Hispanic students.
Second, females had higher educational and occupational aspirations than males. Academic proficiency was the weakest predictor of gain in occupational and educational aspirations in the sample while parental expectations and internal locus of control were the strongest predictors of increase in occupational and educational ...