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The overall purpose of this project will be to work with individual sites that are receiving support from the School-to-Work Opportunities Act to help them develop and strengthen their efforts to recruit, secure, and strengthen employer participation in their school-to-work programs. The sites with which we will work are all building on past programs, such as cooperative education, that have included employer participation and employer-provided work-experience sites. Our project will first examine the past experience that these sites have had with recruiting and working with employers. We will do this through interviews with program personnel and through a telephone survey of participating and nonparticipating employers. We will then work closely with the sites to develop their expanded efforts, tracking their programs as they are put into practice.
A team from the NCRVE site at RAND, led by Cathy Stasz, will also participate in this project.
By the middle of the project's second year, we will produce brief critical summaries of the employer participation efforts in New York State and Los Angeles. At the end of the project we will write a report that will summarize early findings from the employer survey, and evaluate the progress of the programs. These will be expanded into practitioner-oriented briefs that can be used by employers, unions, local-level educators, and states to help them strengthen their efforts to involve employers.
Our work will be used to help the specific efforts of our sites. Additionally, our final report will be designed to use the lessons and insights developed in our interactive work with specific programs to help sites throughout the country. Project outcomes will be further disseminated at the joint NCRVE/Jobs for the Future National Leadership Forum and at other conferences.
Our primary audience will be the staff and employers involved with the programs with which we are working. Dissemination of results to them will take place through the planned activities and reports of the project. Other audiences of interest consist of employers and educators elsewhere who are trying to implement school-to-work programs, as well as state and federal government personnel overseeing the implementation of the STWO Act. These groups will be reached through the final report of the project, the practitioner-oriented briefs, speeches and presentations at the American Vocational Association convention and to various groups of educators and policymakers, and through a conference on employer participation. We will also address other researchers and academics through the publication of articles and through presentations at conferences such as the American Educational Research Association.
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The nature and extent of vocational reform, its goals, and its "fit" with other educational purposes remains a topic of debate among policymakers, educators, and the public. This project offers a timely opportunity to inform those debates by examining the intersection of the various reform currents, the ways in which they play out in schools, and the ways in which they are shaped by policy at multiple levels.
The project is organized into two components. First, a review of policy initiatives and strategies in selected states (the "state reviews") will help us to trace the specific ways in which states are positioned to foster improvements in the transition from school to work. Second, selected local case studies (the "local contexts of reform") represent contrast cases with respect to local and state policy environments, and permit investigation of the possibilities for work education that reside in the most widely publicized of the various secondary reform models.
Two publications will be produced to support the development of policy and program alternatives at the local and state levels. The first will report the first stage of "state reviews," and will be prepared in a format intended for use by state policymakers and program developers.
The second set of materials will incorporate two independent case study reports--one on state-supported reform initiatives and one on local reform driven by the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools. It is intended for use by local and state policymakers and educators.
Project reports will be distributed through NCRVE's distribution network and appropriate conference presentations. Papers based on project findings will be prepared for appropriate journals or for inclusion in books. In addition, we anticipate preparing short summaries of the larger project reports for audiences of practitioners and policymakers, as well as participation in a small number of large-scale conferences.
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This multiyear study will address three research objectives: (1) to examine student demographic characteristics, academic abilities, and educational and occupational aspirations; (2) to describe the array of educational experiences created by local consortia and states for student Tech Prep participants and identify the relationships among these educational experiences and student characteristics; and (3) to ascertain student outcomes (benefits) associated with varying levels of experience with Tech Prep curricula and programs. The research methodology will include a national follow-up survey as well as case studies involving student cohort groups in four to six local Tech Prep consortia in the United States. The findings will have implications for local, state, and federal policy and practice regarding Tech Prep, school-to-work, and educational reform.
Two deliverables will be prepared. First, a monograph will be produced to summarize the findings of a national follow-up study of Tech Prep and the related school-to-work opportunities (STWO) policy at the local level. The report will capture an extensive amount of information about how local consortia implemented Tech Prep during the 1994-1995 academic year in relation to the 1992-1993 academic year when the initial phase of the survey was conducted. One section of the report will present findings about Tech Prep students to help address a void in reliable information about the population of students in local Tech Prep programs.
Second, a final technical report will be produced to summarize the findings of the case studies designed to ascertain in-depth information about Tech Prep student participants, outcomes, and benefits.
This project's findings will be disseminated through annual conferences of the National Tech Prep Network, American Vocational Association, and the American Association of Community Colleges. These presentations will be designed specifically to fulfill the needs of several audiences: local, state, and federal Tech Prep practitioners and policymakers; other educational reformers; business representatives and others engaged in Tech Prep and STWO; educational researchers; and teacher educators. The findings will also be submitted to major professional periodicals such as Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and the Vocational Education Research Journal.
In addition to these national meetings and publications, findings from this project will be presented at other local and state meetings throughout the project year.
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The explosion of education reforms in the past decade is now resurrecting historical tensions between the public university and the public school. Vocationally and academically inspired reformers now share a common problem: both experience reluctance by the university to accept new nonstandard courses and assessments. Ironically, these nonstandard courses and assessments resulted from efforts to make school more meaningful to students by integrating curricula and assessing mastery and performance. In spite of the substantial private, state, and federal investment in these reforms, they will not undergo the test of systemwide implementation if a full range of American youth and educators are not participating. The university holds the key because college-bound youth and parents will not participate if they believe their chances for university admission are compromised. This two-year project focuses on two questions: How are state universities coping with curricular experiments? and What difficulties have reformers encountered with universities? To answer the questions, we propose to undertake a historical review of university-high school relations followed by case studies of how universities located in four different states presently cope with efforts by high schools and community colleges to reform. We then will scale up our analytic efforts to the fifty states, followed by a forum for reformers and university leaders to discuss strategies needed to support promising and educationally sound reforms.
We will produce two documents. The first is a final technical report that will include the historical analysis and results from cross-case analysis of the state case studies and the demonstration forum. The report, produced by RAND, should be of interest to researchers, universities, reformers, and the policy community.
The second document, produced by MPR Associates, is a guide for reformers that will include the results of the fifty-state survey.
In addition, we will convene study participants at a forum designed to further study efforts beyond analysis. We plan a development activity between reformers and university leaders to address opportunities and barriers to lower school reforms.
We will report our findings widely in the practitioner, policy, and research communities through presentations at national meetings hosted by NCRVE, American Vocational Association, American Vocational Education Research Association, and American Educational Research Association. We also expect to produce journal articles for policy-oriented journals. Dissemination will occur with the convening of the forum.
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Recent school reforms call for redesigning educational programs to include both school-based and work-based learning (WBL) components, but precise details about the nature of learning and teaching--what is to be learned or how it should be taught--have not been worked out. In this study, we plan to develop a normative model--or learning paradigm--that can aid in the design of both school-based and work-based education and training programs. The model will be based on recent research in cognitive science that we have recently applied to describe effective classroom teaching in vocational and academic classrooms. In this study, we will extend its application to work-based learning, by conducting in-depth research in targeted WBL programs, using ethnographic and case study methods. The unified model can provide a tool for designing and evaluating a student's entire program, including school-based and work-based components, to ensure that the necessary content is covered and that the instructional activities support effective learning and program goals. The project includes development activities with local school-to-work programs.
Two publications will be developed. A technical report will describe the theory and research that underlies the normative model and the findings from the case study analyses. A short policy brief will discuss implications of the research for policy. This brief will be widely disseminated to the policy community.
The deliverables will be disseminated through regular NCRVE and RAND dissemination channels. Research findings will be disseminated through professional meetings such as American Vocational Association and American Educational Research Association.
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This two-year project will examine the nature and character of efforts to integrate mathematics-vocational education learning initiatives in secondary schools and postsecondary institutions which have adopted the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). During the first year, promising sites were identified to produce new insights regarding the links between vocational education and mathematics integrated learning and teaching experiences occurring in both school and work settings based on NCTM standards. Case studies of four to six programs with significant integration efforts representing different settings (e.g., geographical location) will be conducted to study the effectiveness of applied models of integration and different curriculum materials at both the secondary and postsecondary levels. Our approach will be based on collaborative research where researchers and instructors work closely in partnership.
This project will be a joint undertaking of the University of Wisconsin and the National Center for Research on Mathematical Sciences Education.
The major products of the project will include the following:
Other outcomes will include the following: conference presentations, conference papers, journal articles, texts of paper presentations, evaluation of promising programs, survey instruments, and interview information.
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This study is designed to examine the impact of specific employer interventions on occupational and academic development of young people who work in traditional "youth jobs"--especially in fast food and retail. These interventions include the use of mentors, relating the youths' employment to their school work, and involving parents in their child's work experience.
We have modified the design from Year One to include a survey of current industry practices in working with youth in fast food and retail jobs. This new component to our study will parallel the methodology of the School-Based Enterprise project sponsored by the NCRVE in 1995. We are presently identifying work-based learning initiatives sponsored by fast food businesses nationally. This includes some of the more well-known initiatives such as the McDonald's Youth Apprenticeship program coordinated through Northern Illinois University. However, we have found evidence of local initiatives we intend to investigate as well.
We intend to provide a description of these programs based on the conceptual framework developed for this study. This description will be based on telephone surveys using a protocol that is in development at this time. We will identify up to five local firms for in-depth visits where we will interview student-workers and managers regarding the constructs of the study. One set of visits is scheduled with a locally owned pizza enterprise [15 stores, approximately 600 employees]. The results of this part of the study will be a description of current fast food industry efforts to upgrade the working environment for young people.
We continue to develop sites for the quasi-experimental component to our study. Two sites have agreed to initiate data collection in January 1996. One is a national retail firm; the other is a regional franchise of a national fast food business. Two other sites have been contacted and are considering cooperating with this project. We will continue to pursue these sites as back-up in the event of difficulties with either of the two sites that have agreed to cooperate.
As a result of our first-year activities, we have been able to develop, pilot, and refine our design, instruments, and data collection procedures. In addition, we have developed an interview and observation protocol for the expanded part of our study. We are completing the underlying conceptual framework that supports the study.
We envision two final reports arising from our efforts. The first will be a report of the full study intended for school audiences. In this report, we expect to discuss strategies for using the more common youth-work opportunities in school-to-work efforts. We intend to complete a second report for community and business audiences. In this report, we expect to discuss the value to business of enhancing the traditional youth-workplace.
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This study is designed to identify vocational education practices which reduce absenteeism and dropout rates. It does so by making case studies of successful and unsuccessful vocational programs, using data from New York City programs with low and high absenteeism and dropout rates.
These results, as well as results from other data analysis of New York City career magnet schools, will be disseminated and used for development work with local and state officials in New York and elsewhere, and with federal officials.
At the end of the project, a final report summarizing the research on dropouts will be produced. An article for submission to a prominent journal will also be submitted. If one or more New York Times articles results from the study, we will set up a system of providing callers with brief abstracts of the research and advise them to purchase reports from NCRVE. We will accept invitations to speak at conferences.
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Demographers predict that by the year 2000, 85% of the new workers will be a combination of immigrants, women, and non-European Americans. Increasingly, workplaces will face the same issues and problems that public schools have been facing with regard to understanding and utilizing the full range of human potential within this very diverse population. This two-year research project is designed to study a selected number of major employing companies with exemplary diversity training programs and diverse workforces to identify policies and practices that create work environments that are conducive to the development of all youth in school-to-work programs.
Deliverables