Career Assessment Feedback Specificity and Students' Academic and Career Outcomes

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N

117

Feedback (Response); Outcomes of Education; Academic Achievement; Decision Making; Career Exploration; College Freshmen; Majors (Students); Career Counseling; Career Choice; Student Behavior

979-83-8272-608-3

Three-quarters of students enter college without a clear major or career plan. In efforts to make academic and career decisions that will lead to their success, half of students seek out assistance from their career services office before graduating, most often completing a career assessment. Results from these often-imperfect assessments are a source of career goal suitability feedback, indicating to a person whether they have the characteristics necessary to achieve objective and subjective success in a given occupation. Using archival data, this dissertation explores career goal feedback specificity, self- and environmental career exploration, and academic behavior by comparing the effects of taking different career assessments in a longitudinal dataset of a 2017 cohort of first-time first year undergraduate students (N=2,578). Undecided first year students were more likely to engage in self-exploration through career assessments than their decided counterparts, and, among all students, receiving highly specific suitability feedback from an assessment any time in their undergraduate career resulted in more environmental career exploration and an increased likelihood of making a large change in field of study. This research answers previous calls to examine the feedback associated with career assessments and is the first application of feedback specificity in the career goal feedback literature. Results also inform college career counseling practice by demonstrating the effects of receiving career goal suitability feedback from potentially invalid or unreliable assessments. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

As Provided

2024

ED653014