The purpose of this study was to develop a career counseling program geared toward improving the college students' self-understanding and to examine its effects. In order to pursue the purpose, earlier studies related to program development were analyzed, a model for program development was mapped out, and then a program was developed according to the model to accomplish the intended goal and objectives.
The program development model was composed of five stages: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. And then the substages were selected in detail in consideration of the characteristics and goal of the program and the characteristics of the students to whom the program was to be provided. After program planning, the objectives and contents of the program were determined based on relevant theories about self-understanding and then counseling worksheets were developed. The developed program was modified with the review of experts to be better tailored to the characteristics of the college students.
To verify the effect of the career counseling program developed in this study to improve the self-understanding of college students, pretest and posttest were carried out, and the students engaged in all the activities of the program in every session. The ninty one students who took a general education course "man and ethics" at a college located in Gangwon Province were participated in the experiment. Students were divided into two classrooms and six people worked together as a group. They participated the counseling program for 12 weeks and each session per week lasted 120 minutes.
To examine the effects of the effect of the career counseling program, pretest and posttest for self-efficacy and career beliefs were conducted. As for data analysis, paired-samples t-test was conducted to compare the differences between their pretest and posttest scores, and the level of significance was set at a〈.05 to verify the effectiveness of the program.
As a result of analyzing the effect of the program, the career counseling program was found to exert an influence on the change of the students in self-efficacy and career beliefs. This study is of significance in that the career counseling program developed in this study could be of practical use for the school life satisfaction, career choice and career decision making of college students. The students had a better understanding of themselves and consequently underwent positive changes in the course of participating in the career counseling program. The findings of the study suggest that the career counseling program designed to improve self-understanding could bring favorable changes to not only the self-efficacy and career beliefs of students but their behavior and could be helpful for stable college life as well.