A Study of the Transfer of Group Counseling Skills from Training to Practice

The purpose of this study was to determine i f students trained in the Skilled Group Counseling lhining Model learn and transfer group counseling skills to actual group counseling sessions with clients Thirteen master's degree students who completed a 45-hour group counseling class and, subsequently, a 300-hour group counseling internship were participants in the study. Fifteen of 18 subtest scores and the overall score showed significant improvement from pretest to posttest after skills training but before the internship. Ten of the skills transferred from training to internship-specifically, attending and empathy skills The skills that did not transfer were more behavioral in nature and may not have been used by the counseling interns because of theoretical orientations.