Abstract
Making a career decision has always been a difficult task, requiring the integration of different individual and contextual information. Eighth graders, especially, transitioning from late childhood to early adolescence, may face indecision, confusion and lack of readiness for making a career decision. Consequently, middle-school students need individual career counseling and guidance, an optimizing intervention, focused on their particular problems. The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of using Insight TestToolkit, an online instrument for students’ career assessment and guidance, developed by AMN (Assess-Manage-Navigate), a leading software company that designs educational instruments. Being available on AMN Insight platform, from our practice, we consider this investigation tool to be complex, efficient and comprehensive as it provides multidimensional information about students, helping school counselors facilitate individual career counseling. The test addresses and measures several factors grouped in four categories: Capacity, Me, at school and at home, Big-Five Personality Test, School Guidance and Educational Counseling Questionnaire. One of the advantages of this test is that the scores at each category are compared to the mean of the group the student belongs to, as opposed to establishing a student’s position by comparison to a fixed score. The individual results are presented in a detailed report that contains explanatory graphic representation. Furthermore in this article, we explore the ways in which each category provides core information that comprise content-related assessments that attend to variables such as cognitive abilities, interests, personality traits, motivation for learning, attitude and satisfaction level regarding school and home environment. In the end, our review emphasizes the relevance of the information obtained, as well as the correlations among different types of data. |