Investigating the Usefullness of Counselling Tool to Improve Students’ Self-Awareness

Abstract

The concept of self-awareness has long been observed by researchers as a crucial means that could help individuals to alleviate their psychological distress, thus leading to psychologically healthy individuals. Self -awareness is the state of being consciously aware of one’s internal states and their interactions or relationships with others. The present study was conducted in order to evaluate the usefulness of counseling tool or game in connecting theoretical concepts (self-awareness concept) to practical applications. Most of the time, it is quite difficult for the clients to self-disclose during a counselling session, especially during a group counselling session. Self-disclosure is a process of communication by which one person reveals information about himself or herself to another. With the elements of surprises and fun game embedded in the counseling tool, clients feel more comfortable and confident to complete the task given, especially when playing in a group. Thus a counseling game was developed to help participants feel at ease during a group counseling session, and then through the activities of the game could increase and improve their self-awareness. The objectives of this study are: 1) to determine whether students’ self-awareness improve after playing the game and 2) to investigate to what extent using a game can help counselors to bring out more self-disclosure from participants. The self-awareness game was pilot-tested on a group of 41 underprivileged male adolescents staying at a shelter home. The feedback given by the participants indicates that they enjoyed the game, contributing to easier and faster self-disclosure as well as engagement. Using a brief pre-post-test which were given to participants before and after they played with the game, it was found through paired samples t-test that two out of seven aspects of self-awareness were significantly improved. The general conclusion that can be derived from this study is that counseling session using games can help to increase the effectiveness of the counseling session. The game provides a fun and interactive approach in order to encourage clients to open up during the counseling session. It is hoped that the game can be a useful tool that benefits counselors in improving clients’ self-awareness and self-disclose during the counseling session.