Inquiry and Analysis - Counseling Topics Presentation

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this lesson's material, students will be able to:

  • Identify a creative, focused, and manageable topic.
  • Synthesize information from a variety of sources.
  • Outline conclusions on the topic with support from your sources.
  • Identify limitations and implications for personal practice based on the conclusions.

Instructions

This particular assignment is going to ask you to do some basic research to learn about a topic related to counseling psychology. Your task will be to explore a sample of the existing professional literature and create an online presentation which explores and teaches others about the topic.

Click HERE for a Wikipedia based list of topics. Select from one of these. (If you click on the actual link for you topic you will be brought to the information page within Wikipedia. Sometimes you can find links to peer reviewed articles right in there!)

Working with Topics

The list that is mentioned above is a "starting point" in your topic selection. Essentially, research sets out to answer questions, so you need to formulate a question in your mind as you approach doing research.

Let's say you picked "email counseling" as your topic from the list I provided...you want to formulate a specific question about email counseling that you can research...here are some examples:

"How effective is email counseling?"
"What are the ethical guidelines related to email counseling?"
"What email counseling services are available in Maine?"
"To what extent do insurance companies reimburse for email counseling?"

THESE are the types of questions you begin to do your research on. For THIS assignment you should start on the web with simply Google searches. Eventually you need to have 4 sources of information that you use as the basis for your presentation.

ONE of those sources needs to be "Peer Reviewed" so be sure that you understand what a peer reviewed sources is. I've included some links below to help with that.

What is a Peer Reviewed article?
Using Google for research?
Using your Textbook and Online Databases for Research

Steps in the Process:

  1. Select a topic.
  2. Conduct research on the topic that includes information from AT LEAST ONE "peer reviewed" journal article...additional information can come from other sources.
  3. Prepare your presentation.

For this assignment you are going to create a visual presentation with a voice over recording.

There are some choices in terms of how you want to create a presentation

For more information on creating videos on your iPad click HERE.

Presentation Tips

Keep in mind that this is a presentation...this means that the total of what you are submitting consists of graphic/word representations of the information you discovered in your research and your recorded voice.

This means that your slides do not need to contain EVERY word that you say! Your slides should be simple, attractive, colorful, and meaningful. The voice-over is where you will go into some additional details to explain the content of the slides.

Also, be sure to include your APA citations for ALL of your sources in your presentation.

Make sure you EXPLICITELY cover every aspect of the items in the grading rubric.

You will be sharing your presentation with members of the class in a special discussion board and the presentations will become a permanent part of this class!

Below you will find the grading rubric for the presentation:

Grading Rubric

Introduction
 Provide a brief introduction to the topic. (this can be accomplished in the first couple slides...make sure you have a title slide as your first one) 10
List of Sources

Provide a list of the sources you have used to develop your presentation

You must list your sources in the slide itself and describe them. You must have at least 4 sources, at least ONE source must be a peer reviewed source.

You may have a separate slide for each source if you wish.

 10
Source Summaries

For each source, provide a summary of the content and its contribution to an understanding of the topic.

For this section you should have at least a separate slide for each source.

 40
Analysis

Provide a summary of ALL of your findings and develop a synthesizing statement that brings all your findings together.

This can be done on one or multiple slides.
20
Limitations and Implications

Discuss specific limitations and implications of your findings to the practice of counseling.

This can be done on one or multiple slides.
20