The effectiveness of infusing multicultural knowledge and awareness into a Master's-level internship: A deliberate psychological education approach

The purpose of this study was to integrate a cognitive-developmental approach with a community counseling internship to promote the moral and ego development of graduate counseling students, and to examine the relationship between these constructs and racial identity and self-perceived multicultural competence. This study examined whether utilizing a multiculturally infused deliberate psychological education intervention would be effective in promoting counseling interns' psychological growth and whether differences in moral reasoning and ego development are related to racial identity attitudes. More cognitively complex interns may be better able to apply the multicultural knowledge and awareness needed when working with clients from different cultures.;The results suggest that the counselor interns experienced growth in the domains of ego development and percentage of principled reasoning used in moral judgment, as well as self-perceived multicultural knowledge and awareness. This study will add to the ongoing examination of how counselor education programs infuse issues of diversity, power, race, and privilege into the CACREP-guided curriculum. Although this study did not produce evidence that a DPE intervention was more effective than a standard internship at producing psychological growth on all of the dependent measures, it did produce some encouraging trends that may be useful to future researchers.