Learning processes in the professional development of mental health counselors: knowledge restructuring and illness script formation

Abstract

An important part of learning processes in the professional development of counselors is the integration of declarative knowledge and professional experience. It was investigated in-how-far mental health counselors at different levels of expertise (experts, intermediates, novices) differ in their availability of experience-based knowledge structures. Participants were prompted with 20 client problems. They had to explain those problems, the explanations were analyzed using think-aloud protocols. The results show that experts' knowledge is organized in script-like structures that integrate declarative knowledge and professional experience and help experts in accessing relevant information about cases. Novices revealed less integrated knowledge structures. It is concluded that knowledge restructuring and illness script formation are crucial parts of the professional learning of counselors.

Explaining Away Disorder: The Influence of Context on Impressions of Mental Health Symptoms

“…A large body of work has suggested a lack of expertise effects in the mental health domain (for reviews, see Dawes, 1994;Garb, 1989Garb, , 1998Tracey, Wampold, Lichtenberg, & Goodyear, 2014). Although some work has suggested cognitive changes as experience in mental health is gained (Brailey, Vasterling, & Franks, 2001;Marsh & Ahn, 2012;Strasser & Gruber, 2014;Vollmer, Spada, Caspar, & Burri, 2013), there is still compelling evidence that experienced mental health professionals are more similar to laypeople than not in many ways. We have demonstrated that experienced mental health professionals show the same influence of context as laypeople.…”

How to develop clinical reasoning in medical students and interns based on illness script theory: An experimental study

“…The development of illness script is influenced by the integration of individual knowledge and experience in clinical settings (1,12,13), which is critical for a transition from a novice to an expert (1,12,14). The theoretical process of illness script development includes 4 steps (15,16).…”

Knowledge Formation in Systemic Counselling Trainees from Germany: A Pilot Study from a Competence-Based Perspective

“…The subjects were asked to think out loud (Ericsson & Simon, 1980, 1984, 1993 and explain the terms which were standardised and closely related to the domain. This method is often used in research into expertise, especially in the above-mentioned studies for recording knowledge formation processes (Henrich & Weinhardt, 2018;Strasser, 2006;Strasser & Gruber, 2015). 2.…”

“…Qualitative data material arose from the thinkaloud protocols, which was evaluated with the qualitative content analysis according by Mayring (2015). The resulting audio files were transcribed and content-analysed with MaxQDA, using three categories taken from research into expertise, based on Strasser and Gruber (2015) and Henrich and Weinhardt (2018).…”