School Psychology Major, PhD

Every PhD school psychology student is expected to meet the University of Tennessee school psychology training program’s knowledge and skill requirements. Opportunities for students to meet these requirements will occur in the classroom and during field experiences. The school psychology faculty, along with current and previous students, practicum and internship supervisors, and various other groups who help ensure quality control within our training programs, have contributed to the development of our curricula. Various accrediting and curricula oversight agencies (i.e., APA, NASP, SDE-Tennessee) have their own specific goals and objectives. The School Psychology Handbook, published by the Educational Psychology and Counseling Department describes how the University of Tennessee school psychology training program attempts to meet the goals and objectives of these various training groups.

The University of Tennessee PhD program is designed to provide graded, sequential, and hierarchical training across the following areas.

• Professional school psychology. 
• Consultation and intervention. 
• Assessment. 
• Research and statistics. 
• Psychoeducational core. 
• Field experience and professional practice.

Requirements
The program typically requires five years to complete and requires a minimum of 113 total hours. Students must complete 24 hours of dissertation work and a minimum of 89 graduate course hours, which includes course work, field experiences, and an internship completed in the final academic year. The internship requires 2000 clock hours with a minimum of 600 clock hours in school settings. A comprehensive description of requirements and our recommended sequence of course and field experience work are provided in the School Psychology Handbook.