Counselor training requires not only the acquirement of knowledge but also practices of professional skills and techniques.
A counseling-skills course usually provides both the knowledge and practice of counseling skills. Due to ethical concerns,
the students in the class often use their peers as their practice clients. However, there are three limitations when using peers
as clients. First, its availability can be limited because it needs schedule coordination with a peer to set up a practice session.
Secondly, it can create pressure to watch and be watched while conducting peer practices. The pressure generates anxiety and
can reduce motivation to learn. Lastly, it can be stressful for a novice student to handle the spontaneity of a live counseling
session. To address these three limitations, the authors take the advantage of the latest development of artificial intelligence
(AI) to incorporate a chatbot into a counseling-skills course. The chatbot techniques have been used in medical, educational,
and counseling training. This study used the chatbot as a virtual client for the students to practice their counseling skills. The
chatbot system arranges each segment that focuses on an individual skill. It contains instructions to the addressing counseling
skill so that the students can reviews before and after their chatbot practice. The chatbot system includes 14 segments which
include counseling skills such as debriefing, emotional reflecting, empathizing, structuring, summarizing, immediacy, selfdisclosing,
and confronting/challenging. After the practice, the chatbot system provided instant feedbacks to the students. The
students practiced a chatbot segment each week. It is a self-learning experience since the students implement it from their own
electronical devices and in their own free time. The chatbot system allows great availability because the students can get online
and practice with the chatbot any time they want. The students are interacting with the virtual chatbot instead of their peer,
so the chatbot exercise can reduce the practice-induced stress because. Furthermore, the chatbot arranges practice segments
on a counseling skill each session. This allows the students to focus on learning an individual skill instead of dealing the
complication and variation of the spontaneous reactions from the peer practice.
This study is to investigate the effectiveness of the chatbot-assisted counseling-skills course. A pre-experimental design
was employed. It is with a single-group pretest-posttest methodology and utilizes a mixed-methods approach for comprehensive
data analysis. There are 35 third-year undergraduate counseling students participating in this study. This sample has 9 male
participants. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected to examine the effectiveness of the chatbot-assisted course.
The quantitative data was from the participants’ completions of the Individual Counseling Competence Assessment Form and
the Jefferson Scale of Empathy before and after the course. The Individual Counseling Competence Assessment Form has 8
subscales, which are 7 competence subscales (i.e., Professional Demeanors, Deep Exchanges, Information Exchanges, Basic
Communication, Conceptualization, Individualization, and Theoretical Comprehension) and a personality subscale which is Professional Personality. The three factors of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy are adopted. They are Perspective Taking,
Compassionate Care, and Walking in Patient’s Shoes. The qualitative data was from the focus group discussions at the end of
the semester, classroom observations and the students’ empathy reflection journals.
The t-tests were performed on the quantitative data. The results show the significant increases in all the 7 counseling
competence subscales of the Individual Counseling Competence Assessment Form, but there is no significant change of the
personality subscale. For the Jefferson Scale of Empathy, the only significant change is Compassionate Care and it decreased
significantly. This may appear to be a counter-effectiveness result, but it might reflect that the novices tend to overestimate
their ability to attend to others’ emotions and the practices have given them a realistic estimation of their compassionate care
for the clients. Overall, the results suggest that the chatbot-assisted counseling-skills course enhances the students’ counseling
competency and has provided the students with realistic understanding of their own competency, but it has no significant effect
on their personality change.
In the qualitative data, the students reported the chatbot practice is one main source of their learning in addition to the class
lectures, the peer practices, the transcript writing, and reflection journals. The immediate feedbacks from the chatbot system
promoted the students’ learning motivation to strengthen their counseling skills. The chatbot allows the students to practice what
they had learned from class. It also presents the students with new concepts which stimulate them to search for new counseling
knowledge on their own. The chatbot is friendly to the novices because there is no peer pressure and stress. The chatbot
program contained abundant client information, provided systematic guidelines, and allowed the students to practice each skill
at a time. The students liked the chatbot system because it was an auxiliary learning aid and it is convenient learning avenue
for them to practice in their own time. It was efficient because the chatbot system was constantly revised based on the students’
feedbacks. However, the students reported the chatbot has limitation of spontaneity. It cannot have facial expressions as vivid
as a peer client. Furthermore, the chatbot system cannot respond to the actions that are not programed in it. The students also
suggested the increase of synchronicity between the class materials and the chatbot practice content. These results suggest the
chatbot contributed the effectiveness of the counseling-skills course through its availability, flexibility, immediacy, and systemic
structure. It also reduces stress and promotes self-learning motivation. To advance the chatbot, the system needs to improve its
colloquial words and to have human-like aminations. It needs to increase the coordination between the class and the chatbot
practices.
Practice is a key component when the students learn counseling skills. However, the peer practice, which is often
implemented in a counseling-skills class, can be stressful for the students and requires the schedule coordination with peers.
The latest artificial intelligence technology allows the computer to act as a chatbot to interact with people. This study used
the chatbot as a virtual client for the students to practice their counseling skills at their own time. The study results provide
empirical supports for that the chatbot-assisted learning is a convenient, low-cost and low-stress method to effectively enhance
the students’ counseling competency and learning motivation. It also reveals the limitations of the chatbot system. These
results encourage incorporation of artificial intelligence into the counselor education. The addition of the chatbot system does
not only allow the students to practice what they have learned from class, but also contains new materials to promote selflearning
motivation. However, this does not recommend the chatbot to completely replace the peer practice since the peer
practice provides the students spontaneous human contact experience. The study results suggest modifications for the chatbot
system. The chatbot system needs to be more human-like and to incorporate more colloquial words. In addition to the segment
practice of an individual skill, the students recommend the system to include complete sessions and continuous clients, so
that they can experience the complete process of a session and a counseling case. Though the new materials from the chatbot
can promote self-learning, it is suggested to increase the synchronicity between the class and the chatbot system to enhance
learning comprehension. Finally, the further researches can focus on different student populations, such as master’s and doctoral
counseling students.
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The Effectiveness Study of a Chatbot-Assisted Counseling-Skills Course
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