Assignment Details

Elements of Assessment in Clinical Psychology

For the Unit 6 Assignment, you will take on the role of a clinical psychologist, diagnosing a disorder and offering treatment suggestions. You will need a volunteer friend to help you practice assessment skills. Review the Active Listening Guide to prepare for your assessment.

Plan to spend 15 to 20 minutes with your volunteer “client” asking them to discuss a problem or issue they have been having. You will spend 5-10 minutes practicing non-directive, effective, and active listening skills while your client talks about a problem or concern. Your client will talk for up to a minute about a concern and then when he or she is done, you will briefly paraphrase thoughts and reflect feelings. Then, your client will speak again continuing with whatever thoughts are on his or her mind and you will repeat this exercise. In five minutes, you will probably each have a chance to speak three to five times.

If there is something you do not understand, you can ask a question for clarification. However, please keep in mind that most questions are disguised opinions of the listener. Please note that nowhere in this assignment should you tell your client what you think or what suggestions you have to solve their problem. Your entire focus with this exercise is to practice active and effective listening. If your friend would like to switch roles and practice non-directive active listening skills, then do so. Ask your volunteer for feedback on your listening skills.

Once you have received some feedback regarding your listening skills, you can focus on ways to improve your listening skills. Repeat the entire exercise with another 5-10 minutes (or another 5 minutes each way) as well as feedback on your second round of listening.

Now, pretend you are a graduate student intern presenting to a group of fellow interns about your experience. Create a narrated PowerPoint presentation that follows 6th Edition APA formatting citation and style, addressing the following:

1. Describe your experience with active listening.
   1. What was easy? What was hard?
   2. What feedback did you receive from your volunteer?
   3. What steps can you take to improve your active listening skills?
2. Discuss the elements of an effective clinical interview.
   1. What information do you need to collect? Why? Provide scholarly or peer-reviewed resources to support your responses.
3. Discuss the importance of informed consent.
   1. What elements need to be present for an effective and ethical informed consent? Provide scholarly or peer-reviewed resources to support your responses.
4. What role does environment play in establishing rapport?
   1. How might you set up your professional workspace to facilitate rapport building? Explain your reasoning and provide scholarly or peer-reviewed resources to support your responses.
5. What personal characteristics do you possess that will make you effective during the assessment and diagnostic process?
6. Going back to your volunteer client: if this was a true assessment for clinical services, which diagnostic assessment tool would you administer and why?
   1. Choose any of the tools from Chapters 9 and 10. How would the information collected from this tool assist you with diagnosis and treatment for this individual? Provide scholarly or peer-reviewed resources to support your responses.

Writing Requirements and Assignment Guidelines

Your Assignment should be at least 10 slides, not including the title and reference slides, and should include the following elements:

• Title slide: Provide your name, title of Assignment, course and unit number, and date
• Body: Answer all the questions in complete sentences and paragraphs. Both the written narrative and the oral presentation must avoid only being single answers to each of the questions. Please be sure to provide a clear connection throughout, using highly developed organization and style. The communication of your thoughts must be highly ordered, logical, and unified.
  • Please be sure to comply with quality presentation style standards: the items on the slides should be bulleted lists and/or include visuals that support the longer, narrated oral presentation.
  • You must include an audio recording (see directions) of yourself, using complete sentences and paragraphs, explaining the information that you include on each of the PowerPoint slides.
  • The narrative must be spoken in Standard English, include a highly developed viewpoint and purpose, and demonstrate superior oral delivery techniques, including word choice and oral expressiveness. The communication of your thoughts must be highly ordered, logical, and unified, displaying exceptional content, organization, and style.
  • Additionally, please be sure that your narrative moves past only answering the questions directly, but rather providing answers that evolve into a substantive response that supports a clear and dynamic conclusion, summing up the total purpose of the answered questions. In other words, the total presentation should be presented as a single prominent idea to be communicated.
• Reference page: Sources in APA format
  • Include a minimum of two scholarly or peer-reviewed resources to support your responses (the textbook and one other)
• Use Arial or Times New Roman 12 point font, double-spaced
• Use APA Formatting and Citation style
  • If you need assistance with APA style, please visit the Writing Center.

This Assignment assesses the following Course Outcomes:

PS380-2: Discuss the clinical psychologist’s role in diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders.

GEL-1.3: Demonstrate college-level communication through the oral delivery of original materials in Standard English.

Reading and Resources

Please read the following chapters in your text:

• Chapter 9: “Intellectual and Neuropsychological Assessment”
• Chapter 10: “Personality Assessment and Behavior Assessment”

Chapter 9 includes intelligence testing. You will learn about classical theories of intelligence and the assessments that have been developed out of these theories. You will learn about the differences between intelligence and achievement. You will also learn about specialized testing used to assess cognitive functioning and impairment, neuropsychological testing.

Chapter 10 covers objective and projective methods of assessing both personality and psychopathology. These results are important in diagnosing psychological disorders. You will also learn about behavioral assessments through naturalistic observation and self-assessment.

Practice the concepts covered in this unit by completing the Unit 6 Key Terms Activity.

Journal Articles

Please review the Library Guide for a list of articles to read for this unit. These have been selected from various academic journals, all of which can be found in the Purdue Global Library. Though they are not required to complete the coursework for this unit, they will be helpful for anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of clinical psychology.

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