Efficacy of Solution-focused Brief Counseling on Math Assignment Completion and Accuracy in an Elementary School

A multiple-baseline-across-participants design was used to evaluate the efficacy of Solution-focused Brief Counseling (SFBC) for six fifth grade students with math assignment completion problems. Weekly 30-minute sessions of SFBC for 5 weeks were sufficient to produce increases in both completion rates (from 29% completion during baseline to 79.63% during treatment) and accuracy rates (from 23.50% during baseline to 50.01% during treatment). Most increases were maintained during a 1 to 3 week follow up period. In addition, the criterion-related validity of Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS) was evaluated by comparing predicted completion and accuracy rates to actual achievement. Independent t tests between predicted and achieved scores revealed significant differences for five out of six participants (α set to .05). Thus, the validity of GAS in educational settings is questionable when predicted scores can be compared to objective measures of performance in academic settings.