NCE flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

NCE exam format

A computer-based, 200-item multiple-choice examination with one best answer per item and a four-hour testing window; no penalty applies for incorrect answers, so all items should be attempted.

Criterion-referenced scoring

Scores are compared to a fixed passing standard rather than to other examinees' performance; the standard is established by a modified Angoff panel of subject-matter experts.

Scaled score

The reported score is a transformation of the raw number of correct answers onto a common scale, allowing comparison across test forms of differing difficulty.

Eight CACREP core areas

Professional orientation and ethics; social and cultural diversity; human growth and development; career development; counseling and helping relationships; group work; assessment and testing; research and program evaluation.

Foundational knowledge domain

The blueprint area covering the history and philosophy of counseling, counselor roles and settings, and the organization of mental health service delivery systems.

Professional practice and ethics

The blueprint area emphasizing informed consent, confidentiality and its exceptions, boundary management, and adherence to the ACA and NBCC codes of ethics.

Item stem structure

Most NCE items present a brief client scenario followed by a question asking for the most appropriate counselor action, interpretation, or theoretical application.

Modified Angoff method

A standard-setting procedure in which expert judges estimate the probability that a minimally competent examinee would answer each item correctly; summed estimates define the passing score.

Informed consent elements

Disclosure of counseling purpose, procedures, risks and benefits, confidentiality limits, fees, counselor qualifications, and the client's right to withdraw at any time.

Confidentiality exceptions

Situations permitting disclosure without consent include serious and foreseeable harm to self or others, suspected child or elder abuse, court orders, and certain supervisory or consultation contexts.

Tarasoff duty to protect

When a client poses serious danger to an identifiable third party, the counselor must take reasonable steps such as warning the victim or notifying authorities, per state law.

Privileged communication

A legal protection, granted by statute, that prevents a counselor from testifying about confidential client communications in court; narrower than confidentiality and varies by jurisdiction.

Multiple relationship risk

A secondary relationship with a client, such as a business or social role, is avoided unless it is beneficial, non-exploitative, and documented with safeguards and consultation.

Multicultural counseling competence

The triad of counselor self-awareness of biases, knowledge of clients' cultural context, and skills in culturally responsive interventions, as described by Sue and colleagues.

Cultural encapsulation

Wrenn's term for the counselor's tendency to interpret clients solely through their own cultural assumptions while ignoring the client's worldview and context.

Etic versus emic

Etic approaches apply universal, culture-general constructs; emic approaches apply culture-specific constructs derived from within a particular cultural group.

Piaget's four stages

Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational; each stage is marked by qualitatively different reasoning, and formal operations emerge around age eleven.

Erikson's psychosocial stages

Eight stages from trust versus mistrust in infancy to integrity versus despair in late adulthood; each poses a crisis whose resolution shapes later personality development.

Kohlberg moral development

Three levels (preconventional, conventional, postconventional) with two stages each, moving from self-interest to social approval to universal ethical principles.

Attachment styles

Bowlby and Ainsworth identified secure, anxious-ambivalent, and avoidant patterns in infancy; later work added disorganized attachment, linked to inconsistent or frightening caregiving.

Classical conditioning

Pavlov's paradigm in which a neutral stimulus paired repeatedly with an unconditioned stimulus comes to elicit a conditioned response; the basis of systematic desensitization.

Operant conditioning

Skinner's model in which behavior is shaped by consequences: positive and negative reinforcement increase behavior, while positive and negative punishment decrease it.

Social learning theory

Bandura's view that behavior is acquired through observation and modeling, mediated by attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation, and influenced by self-efficacy.

Holland's RIASEC types

Six vocational personality types (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional); career satisfaction is predicted by congruence between personality type and work environment.

Super's life-span theory

Career development unfolds across life stages (growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, decline) and life roles, with vocational self-concept evolving through experience.

Krumboltz social learning theory

Career choice results from learning experiences and instrumental and associative learning; counselors address faulty self-observations and help clients create new learning opportunities.

Psychoanalytic transference

The client unconsciously redirects onto the counselor feelings originally attached to significant figures from childhood; analyzing it is central to psychodynamic technique.

Person-centered core conditions

Rogers specified congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding as necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic personality change.

CBT cognitive triad

Beck's model holds that depression involves negative views of the self, the world, and the future; treatment targets automatic thoughts and underlying schemas.

Group stages

Groups progress through forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning; leader interventions shift from orientation and safety to working and then termination.

Reliability versus validity

Reliability is consistency of measurement across time or items; validity is the degree to which a test measures what it claims, and it requires reliability but is not guaranteed by it.

Standard error of measurement

An index of test score precision, computed as the standard deviation times the square root of one minus reliability; used to build confidence intervals around obtained scores.