Evidence-Based School Counseling: Introduction to the Special Issue on Proceedings From the 2023 EBSCC Conference

This special issue of Professional School Counseling (PSC) includes a selection of articles that are based on presentations given at the 12^th annual national Evidence-Based School Counseling Conference (EBSCC) held at The Ohio State University on March 10–12, 2023. This is the fourth special edition and we are grateful to the American School Counselor Association for this ongoing collaboration that provides highlights of the research and scholarship from the EBSCC in PSC.

The evidence-based school counseling (EBSC) conference was started in 2013 to share resources and ideas about the use of data to make school counseling program decisions, about research on effective interventions and related student outcomes, and about methods for evaluating our work to demonstrate efficacy (see Zyromski & Dimmitt, 2019, for a full history). The work has evolved over time, with increased attention to systemic change that supports all students and to antiracist and social justice efforts (Dimmitt & Zyromski, 2020; Zyromski & Dimmitt, 2022). The EBSCC conference has continuously sought to provide practitioners and school counselor educators with cutting edge scholarship about effective practice and research about key student outcomes related to our field.

With this edition, we want to acknowledge the tremendous difficulties that have existed in the past four years in doing school-based research. Students, their families, and school professionals have all been stretched thin during the pandemic and concurrent social events of this time. The continuing process of recovery from the social and academic losses of those years has made school counseling and school counseling research even more challenging than usual.

Related to this, the article by Slaten and colleagues addresses the ways that school counselors have negotiated classroom-based interventions post-pandemic, and they report that while barriers still exist, most school counselors continue to want to engage in this modality and see the value and impact of doing so.

The increase in youth mental health challenges post-pandemic has been widely documented (Office of the Surgeon General, 2021), and several articles provide helpful ideas and resources. An article by Cunningham and Granello offers useful school counseling strategies for supporting students as they re-enter school after a mental health crisis. Wood suggests a framework for understanding the multiple forms of grief that students may be experiencing, along with related implications and suggestions for school counseling practice. An article by Saunders, Cogburn, and Nguyen also prioritizes students’ mental health, providing an overview of mindfulness-based interventions that can be integrated at different tiers within a multi-tiered system of support framework.

One of the core aspects of an effective school counseling program is providing preventative and resiliency-building interventions. An article by Leopold and colleagues articulates a model for empowering students to advocate for and create individual, classroom, and systemic changes in their lives. This way of working pre-supposes that students have the capacity for tremendous impact in their environments, and that part of our work is to support them in that awareness and then related efforts.

Understanding how change is created and supported is an ongoing aspect of counseling scholarship, and an article by Kim and colleagues addresses this topic through an examination of mechanisms of change identified in school counseling intervention studies. These authors looked for inclusion of professional or theoretical foundations for practice such the ASCA Mindsets & Behaviors in intervention studies, with the premise that the theories or models that we choose as foundations for our interventions have an impact on what we do, and our outcomes, whether intended or not.

In a creative solution to the challenges to including student voice and perspective in our research, Yoon and colleagues conducted interviews with LGBTQ+ students of color who were college students about their K-12 experiences navigating their intersectional identities, and the role of school counselors in this process. Hearing from young adults about their recent school experiences provides an important and unique perspective on the ways that we can make sure that all students are supported by our programs.

School counseling has embraced the value of evaluation as a core part of our work (ASCA, 2019), yet it is still a practice in its infancy for our profession. Beasley provides a thoughtful article about the ways that school counselors do and do not identify as evaluators, and how that ambivalence contributes to our engagement with evaluation practices.

This special issue based on the proceedings of the 2023 Evidence-based School Counseling Conference contains many ideas for effective and impactful school counseling practice. During these complex and challenging times, it’s incredibly helpful to have both thoughtful systems for critical thinking about our work and concrete suggestions for effective practice. This is valuable work we do—helping students become the best versions of themselves, empowering them to create positive change in their environments and to navigate roadblocks and mental health setbacks—and our scholarship provides useful guidance.