The Effects of a Career Group Counseling Program on the Career Maturity and Achievement Motivation of Elementary School Underachievers

진로집단상담 프로그램이 초등학교 학습부진아동의 진로성숙과 성취동기에 미치는 효과

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a career group counseling program on the career maturity and achievement motivation of elementary school underachievers. This study targeted the fifth grader underachievers. Twenty underachievers, whose pre-test homogeneity in career maturity and achievement motivation was verified, were allocated to an experimental group and a control group by 10 underachievers each. The program was conducted for a total of 12 sessions, twice per week, and each session lasted 80 minutes. For verification of the program effects in this study, MANOVA and ANOVA were carried out for pre- and post-score tests between the groups, and repeated-MANOVA and paired t-test were peformed to look into the changes within a group by using SPSS/WIN(version 12.0) in terms of statistical analyses. The findings in this study are as follows: First, as a result of post test for the experimental and control groups, and difference verification of post and pre-tests within the experimental group, both career maturity and sub-factors of career maturity demonstrated significant differences. Second, as a result of difference verification of the pre- and post-tests within the experimental group, achievement motivation significantly improved, but there was no statistically significant difference in achievement motivation in the post-test of experimental and control groups. However, of the sub-factors of the achievement motivation, self-confidence and Interest in the long-term future significantly improved. Third, we can see that the career group counseling program provided opportunities for the underachievers to search their own character, interest, and aptitude, and broadly encounter the world of occupations. Also, we can infer that the underachieves had active and developmental attitudes towards future dreams and their current efforts. As noted above, the career group counseling program proved that it has a positive effect to the improvement of the elementary school underachievers' career maturity and achievement motivation in some variables.