James R. Stone

Rigor and Relevance: Enhancing High School Students’ Math Skills Through Career and Technical Education:

Numerous high school students, including many who are enrolled in career and technical education (CTE) courses, do not have the math skills necessary for today’s high-skill workplace or college entrance requirements. This study tests a model for enhancing mathematics instruction in five high school CTE programs (agriculture, auto technology, business and marketing, health, and information technology). The model includes a pedagogy and intense teacher professional development. Volunteer CTE teachers were randomly assigned to an experimental (n = 59) or control (n = 78) group. The experimental teachers worked with math teachers to develop CTE instructional activities that integrated more mathematics into the occupational curriculum. After 1 year of the math-enhanced CTE lessons, students in the experimental classrooms performed equally on technical skills and significantly better than control students on two standardized tests of math ability (TerraNova and ACCUPLACER®).

Inside the Black Box: Exploring the Value Added by Career and Technical Student Organizations to Students' High School Experience.

This study explored the hypothesis that Career Technical Student Organizations (CTSOs) provide a variety of experiences that either directly or indirectly affect three important outcomes of secondary education: achievement, transition to postsecondary education and training, and employability. A pre-post-test comparison study of high school students (n=1797) in CTE classes that included CTSO classes, CTE classes without a CTSO, and general (non-CTE) classes was conducted over the course of one academic year. Compared to the other groups, CTSO students reported higher levels on a variety of positive behavioral, academic, and psychosocial measures at the start of the year, but they did not report as much gain over the year. More types of participation in CTSOs was associated with greater academic motivation, academic engagement, grades, career self-efficacy, college aspirations, and employability skills. Finally, of four organizational elements of CTSOs, competitions were found to have the most positive effects. The work reported herein was supported under the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education Program, PR/Award No. VO51A990006 administered by the Office of Vocational and Adult Education, U.S. Department of Education. However, the contents do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of the Office of Vocational and Adult Education or the U.S. Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government. Alfeld, Hansen, Aragon, & Stone

Reflections on US Perspectives on VET

The present non-system of VET, or CTE, in the United States is the culmination of more than 100 years of ad hoc attempts to develop a national system of workforce development. While occasionally flirting with the notion of emulating European VET, the American education system is too decentralized to accommodate such an approach. Instead, America has a disconnected collection of education systems that rarely coordinate and often compete. With no national system of qualifications to guide decision making, the various systems work in relative isolation from each other. This disorganization has resulted in the college degree as a default occupational qualification and suggesting anything less as a trajectory for students is usually met with skepticism by parents, accusations of tracking by critics, and little support from the business community. With an increased emphasis on CTE from the federal government, there is great opportunity to address these issues and create a more coherent, transparent system that will better serve young people and employers.