As college teachers, counselors are mainly responsible for the political work of school students. Besides, college counselors also need to be responsible for students’ ideological and psychological education, and be their political leaders and psychological. At present, many colleges have introduced political education and mental health education, but there is relatively little research on the combination of the two. The training and assessment for college counselors are also only focused on political work at present. It is crucial to explore the path for college counselors to carry out political work and psychological counseling work under the dual role orientation.

A set of controlled experiments was set up to explore the development of counselors’ political work and counseling work under different educational and teaching modes. One hundred and forty-four counselors from a college in China were selected as the study subjects. The 144 counselors were randomly divided into three groups of equal number, which were recorded as group A, group B and group C. The counselors in group A were given political work training only, those in group B were given mental health education only, and those in group C were given a combination of political work training and mental health education. The training is taught over a period of five months, with counsellors tested on their political work and mental health scores at two-month intervals.Table 1.

Mean scores of subjects in different groups before and after the instruction

In the first month of training, the mean scores of subjects in groups A, B and C were 65.12, 62.35 and 64.19 before the instruction, and after the instruction, their scores changed to 65.78, 62.38 and 66.78. In the third month, the mean scores of subjects in the three groups were 65.22, 62.58 and 72.21 before the instruction, and 68.23, 65.21 and 78.45 after the instruction. In the fifth month, the mean scores of the three subjects were 68.95, 65.59 and 81.45 before the instruction, and after the instruction, their scores changed to 70.12, 68.71 and 85.18.

Political work training or mental health education alone is not as effective as combined teaching. To cultivate the dual roles of college counselors, both political work and psychological counseling should be combined.

The research is supported by: 2022 Chongqing Social Science “Research on the Interpretation of the Spirit of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee” Special Project “Research on Maintaining the Authority and Centralized Unified Leadership of the CPC Central Committee in the New Era” (No. 2021YBCS12); 2022 Humanities and Social Science Research Project of Chongqing Education Commission (Ideological and Political Special Project) “CPC Secretary General Xi Jinping’s An important Treatise on the Need to Improve the ‘Three Abilities’ on Politics” (No. 22SKSZ080); 2022 Humanities and Social Science Research Project of Chongqing Education Commission (Selective Funding Program for Outstanding University Counselors) “Research on the Path of University Counselors to Improve the ‘Three Abilities of Politics’” (No. fdyzy2022007); 2022 key Project of Higher Education Science Research of Chongqing Higher Education Association “Research on the Political Ability of University Counselors in the New Era” (No. CQGJ21A030).