Challenges of Guidance and Counselling University Students During “Practicum” Exercise

Abstract

Practicum is a platform designed for counsellors-in-training to assist them to become full professional counsellors. Practicum exercise is one of the major processes for gaining mastery of key concepts in counselling. The detached between theory and practice is a major challenge. This research, therefore focused on the challenges of guidance and counselling students in University of Ilorin during practicum. The descriptive study was adopted in this study. The researcher employed the use of simple random technique to select 220 undergraduate students in the Department of Counsellor Education University of Ilorin. The developed questionnaire was titled “Challenges of Practicum Exercise Questionnaire (CPEQ)”. This was adopted to gather information from the respondents. The instrument had a reliability coefficient of 0.70. The demographic data were analyzed using percentages. Hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The obtained result showed that lack of adequate facilities for practicum exercise, inadequate mastery of counselling skills and inability to synthesize concepts during presentation are the major challenges. All the hypotheses were accepted. Based on these findings, it was recommended that students in training should constantly engage in micro counselling in the laboratory, this will assist them to gain mastery of counselling procedures and thereby overcome challenges on the field.

Keywords

• Challenges
• Practicum
• Guidance & Counselling