Attitudes Educational Counselors in Public Schools Towards Usage of Online Counseling in Light of The Corona Pandemic and Its Relationship to Their Professional-self

Abstract

The study aims to identify the Attitudes of educational counsellors in Palestinian public schools towards the use of electronic counselling in light of the Corona pandemic and its relationship to their professional-self and to investigate the differences in the attitudes of educational counsellors in Palestinian government schools towards the use of online counselling and their professional-self, according to these variables: gender, educational qualification, years of experience, place of residence, directorate. The study uses the relational, descriptive approach, as it applies two measures: the attitude of educational counsellors towards the usage of electronic counselling and professional-self, on a stratified random sample of 453 educational counsellors in the northern governorates, in the academic year 2020/2021 AD. The results show that the attitudes of educational counsellors in Palestinian public schools towards the use of e-counselling were positive, with a mean of 3.19. The results also show a statistically significant relationship between the attitudes of educational counsellors in Palestinian public schools towards the use of electronic counselling and their level of professional-self, and the value of the Pearson correlation coefficient of the relationship between them is 0.126, and the relationship was positive. In other words, the more positive attitudes of educational counsellors in Palestinian public schools towards the use of e-counselling, the higher their professional-self, and the results show the existence of a predictive ability that is statistically significant for the educational counsellors’ attitudes towards using e-counselling in their professional-self, whenever the professional-self rises one degree, there is a positive, direct change in the educational counsellors’ attitudes towards using electronic counselling by 0.145 The results indicate that there are no statistically significant differences in the attitudes of educational counsellors in Palestinian public schools towards the use of electronic counselling due to variables: gender, educational qualification, place of residence, and directorate. While the results show that there are statistically significant differences according to the years of experience in the counselling variable in favor of those with less than two years of experience and those with 5-10 years of experience. While it shows that there are no statistically significant differences in the vocational self among the educational counsellors in the Palestinian public schools due to variables: gender, educational qualification, place of residence, directorate, and years of experiences. Among the recommendations called for by the study is the adoption of the General Administration of Guidance and Special Education to establish a centre for e-counselling to undertake the process of training and qualifying educational counsellors to use electronic counselling with the latest technologies and modern methods, in addition to working to provide training programs for educational counsellors to raise their efficiency in e-counselling.