1 - (SYM 65) Supervision Training in Graduate Programs in Health Service Psychology: Moving from Conceptual to Procedural

Abstract Body
Clinical supervision is considered to be a foundational and functional competency clinical training (Rodolfa, et al., 2005) with exposure to the knowledge of clinical supervision emphasized by American Psychological Association (APA) accreditation requirements. Knowledge exposure is a beginning step in the training of supervisors, but may not lead to practical changes in clinical supervision skills. Falender (2018) highlights challenges in psychology curricula and training and describes training in clinical supervision as “inadequately addressed”. The current study sought to establish the extent to which APA accredited programs provide training in competency‐based supervision and whether this training involved conceptual or procedural/practical components in supervision practice. Further, we wanted to determine if knowledge if training in clinical supervision varied as function of the population served (i.e., clinical work with parents and youth). The current study is a content analysis of 43 course syllabi from all APA accredited programs (APA; December, 2023). Each program's curricula were reviewed and requests were made to either individual faculty who taught courses in supervision or to the Directors of Clinical Training, asking for specific course syllabi or any courses where they indicated that training in clinical supervision was provided. Of the parent project respondents (n= 418), 11% returned syllabi for the present study. Efforts are on-going to gather more course syllabi. Each course syllabus was coded by the clinical supervision training research team for "course objectives", "course assignments", "course knowledge content", "number of weeks of training/exposure", and "presence/absence of a practical component" in supervisory training. Review of course syllabi revealed that few had a practical component and none to date had an experiential component. Given the complexity of cases involving disruptive behavior problems and their ubiquity (Accurso, 2011), competently trained supervisors are essential to improving therapist competence. Findings will be discussed through the lens of APA (2015) supervision competency criteria for trainees working with families and youth. Recommendations will be offered for the integration of supervision training within graduate curricula.