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| Stasz, C., & Brewer, D. J. (1999). Academic Skills at Work: Two Perspectives (MDS-1193). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California. |
It is now commonly accepted that changes in work and the workplace are transforming the kinds of knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for successful work performance. Evidence of the need for new skill comes from many sources, including the National Employer Surveys conducted by the National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce (NCEQW) (1995) and from a small but growing body of empirical research on work (e.g., Barley & Orr, 1997; Hull, 1992; Stasz, Ramsey, Eden, Melamid, & Kaganoff, 1996). The research indicates that employers are often more concerned about "soft" skills or attitudes rather than technical knowledge or competencies. They seek employees with the right attitudes and dispositions toward work--individuals who are motivated, honest, responsible, reliable, willing to learn on the job, and willing to take responsibility for their own learning. Employers and workers also note the need for "generic" skills such as problem solving, communication, and the ability to work in teams (Stasz et al., 1996).
In recognition of changing skill demands, policymakers and others have been developing new frameworks for defining skills that incorporate but go beyond the traditional high school menu of courses to develop academic or job-specific vocational skills. The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) (1991, 1992), for example, introduced a two-part framework: (1) workplace "competencies" such as interpersonal skills, familiarity with technology, or ability to manage resources; and (2) "foundation skills," including the basic skills of reading, writing, arithmetic, and mathematics. The federal government is supporting the development of skill standards in 22 industries. These efforts to define new skills do not always discuss academic skills and standards in much detail, nor do they delineate relationships among academic skills, work competencies, industry-specific skill standards, or work disposition and attitudes.
In the process of redefining skills, we have not yet reached consensus on terminology or definitions. The term "academic skills" is generally associated with subject-matter areas defined by the various school disciplines such as English, mathematics, history, science, and so on. Knowledge about those subjects is primarily learned in school and is expected to be broadly transferable to situations and circumstances outside school.
Work competencies, or "generic skills" as defined by SCANS and others, are thought to be broadly transferable across work settings, although they can take on different meanings in different contexts. Problem solving, for example, is a general term that represents a particular competency, but the process itself varies with different tasks or situations. Without attention to context, terms like "problem solving" or "communication" are rendered meaningless, especially as definitions of what should be taught in classrooms (Stasz, 1997).
Industry standards refer to skill requirements specified in a particular industry and may refer to academics (e.g., math knowledge needed by surveyors) or to knowledge about certain tools or processes (e.g., operation of an x-ray machine). The actual skills needed depend on a particular work context.
Work attitudes or dispositions are perhaps the most difficult to define, as there is no accepted way to conceptualize them. The term generally refers to any "non-cognitive" factor that can affect learning and performance and includes such constructs as motivation, volition, and disposition (Stasz et al., 1996; Stasz, 1997).
The feeling that new skills are required for work has motivated some important shifts in thinking about how to best prepare young people for education and work after high school. Educators and school reformers are updating curriculum or redesigning school programs at all levels as a way to ensure that young people have opportunities to learn work-related skills and attitudes in addition to academics. Reformers also increasingly perceive that all students, not just those destined for traditional vocational programs, can benefit from approaches that change both the content and process of learning.
Despite the interest in supporting students' development of work-related skills and attitudes, the traditional academic curriculum remains the mainstay of high school education. In the decade following the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), many states increased the academic requirements for high school graduation. In 1982, only 13% of high school graduates had completed a core curriculum of four years of English, three years of social studies, science, and math; by 1992, 47% of graduating seniors had taken this coursework (Jennings, 1996). Over the same time period, enrollments dwindled in vocational programs, through which students are most likely to have opportunities to learn work-related skills and competencies.
The desire to raise academic standards and, at the same time, to provide opportunities for students to acquire other competencies creates substantial challenges for educators. It requires some reconciliation between the teaching of academic subjects and of work-related skills and competencies. Expanding this curriculum to better meet new skill demands raises some challenging questions:
Answering these questions requires understanding the complex relationships between academic and non-academic skills and work.
To begin to outline the relationships among academics, work-related skills, and work, we conducted a one-year exploratory study along three lines of inquiry. We reviewed the literature to identify empirical studies and salient issues in the discussion about academic skill needs and any empirical research that sheds light on academic skill demands. Second, we carried out a new analysis of existing data from a previous study of seven technical jobs (Stasz et al., 1996). Finally, we analyzed existing longitudinal survey data on high school students to define different types of skills and to examine their relationship to a variety of post-school outcomes. By pursuing these three lines of inquiry, we hoped to provide some information about the type and level of academic skill demand requirements in work and also to help frame future discussion and research on this topic.
This study is not intended to yield a comprehensive or generalizable set of answers. The analyses conducted here made use of existing data sets which constrain the analytic task itself and the generalizability of findings. Thus, we can only examine academic skills within certain tracks of the labor market and certain student groups. Even with these constraints, we believe the analyses yield new and useful information on relationships between academic skills and work.
The base premise of our approach is that skills are most appropriately viewed as multivariate. In the popular literature, a multivariate view of skills is perhaps best encapsulated in Howard Gardner's (1993) writing about multiple intelligences. He defines seven intelligences: "the linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences that are at such a premium in schools today; musical intelligence; spatial intelligence; bodily-kinesthetic intelligence; and two forms of personal intelligence, one directed toward other persons, one directed toward oneself" (p. xi). Although the analyses in Chapters 3 and 4 may not appear to have a lot in common, they both share this important perspective.
In conducting this exploratory study, our goal was to provide information and analysis that is useful to a wide variety of audiences: curriculum developers and teachers who need to make decisions about the scope of the curriculum and the relative emphasis on different subjects; teachers interested in developing problem-based curricula and activities that apply academic knowledge in meaningful ways; policymakers at different levels faced with curriculum-related decisions that affect the general shape of the curriculum, particularly at the high school level; employers who partner with schools and educators to develop alternative education programs; and researchers who study relationships between skills and school or employment outcomes.
This report is organized into five chapters. Following this introduction, Chapter 2 discusses the literature review and frames salient issues and research findings about academic skills at work; Chapter 3 examines mathematics, science, and technology skills in seven technical jobs, following the same approach as our initial investigation of "generic" skills in these occupations; Chapter 4 reports on the quantitative analysis of existing longitudinal data sets; and Chapter 5 summarizes themes and findings across the three strands of the study and discusses implications for future work.
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| Stasz, C., & Brewer, D. J. (1999). Academic Skills at Work: Two Perspectives (MDS-1193). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California. |