Evaluating Professional Clinical Competency Development in Doctor of Psychology Students Using Multiple Methods of Evaluation: Peer, Supervisor, and Self-Assessment

The United States is currently facing a shortage of mental-health providers that affects 160 million Americans. The need to empower the health system with appropriately knowledgeable, skilled, and diversely aware people mental-health practitioners is a critical necessity for current and future healthcare needs. This study aims to validate the importance of multiple methods of evaluation (self, peer, supervisor) in competency-based training of clinical psychologists. Multiple methods of evaluation offer unique contributions to competency-based education, including providing a scaffolding for building confidence and progressive alignment of evaluation of self with supervisor evaluation. Over time, students were able to better align with supervisor evaluation of strengths and weaknesses and core training competencies, while peers played an important role in scaffolding confidence. Multimodal evaluations facilitated improved self-assessment in growing clinicians' education--an important developmental competency. [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.]