Curriculum evaluation and assessment of multicultural genetic counselor education

Abstract

Multicultural competence in genetic counseling integrates racial- cultural knowledge, awareness, and skills into clinical interventions and research practices. Researchers and educators often cite racial-cultural factors as obstacles for visible racial-cultural people seeking help. However, the professional's unfamiliarity of how his or her own racial- cultural group affiliations are influenced by the history of discrimination and oppression coupled with their lack of self-understanding of racial- cultural issues for him- or herself has also limited the effectiveness of genetic counseling. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the Handbook of Cross-Cultural Genetic Counseling, a multicultural curriculum developed for genetic counseling education for increasing multicultural counseling competence. The multicultural curriculum was evaluated for its effectiveness of increasing multicultural counseling competence using a nonequivalent control group design. A participant's multicultural counseling competence was hypothesized to increase after being taught the curriculum. The curriculum was effective for increasing multicultural counseling competence. Additionally, achieved multicultural counseling competence was not influenced by when the curriculum was taught. Trend analyses measuring the longitudinal impact of the curriculum on multicultural competence were significant. Implications of the results are discussed.