Philip A. Reed

Instructional Alignment of Workplace Readiness Skills in Marketing Education

This study examined high school marketing education teachers knowledge of workplace readiness skills and whether that knowledge had an impact on student workplace readiness skill achievement. Further, this study examined the usage of Virginias 13 Workplace Readiness Skills curriculum and identified the teaching methods and instructional strategies used to disseminate the skills to students. Three sets of data were used for this study: teacher workplace readiness skills data, teacher survey data, and student workplace readiness skills post-test data. Pearsons correlation was used to determine whether teacher knowledge of workplace readiness skills had an impact on student attainment of the same. The results showed that while overall teacher scores did not show a statistical significance on overall student scores, there were four individual skill areas in which there was a relationship between teacher and student scores.

Development of a container handling port simulation for demonstrating port related careers

In a world where next day delivery is a small price to pay for tardy gift selection and names of delivery companies have become verbs, we tend to forget that the relatively slow, ship-based transportation of goods enclosed in 40 by 8 by 8.6 feet boxes accounts for 95 percent of all world cargo movement. In the Hampton Roads region ports alone, approximately 1.2 million containers were handled in 2008. The ability of the regions ports to operate efficiently and safely while managing this load depends largely on the availability of trained personnel. However, availability of a skilled workforce to satisfy current and future needs of the port industry is of concern. This concern stems from the fact that students lack awareness about port-related careers something that limits the number of students that pursue education and training that could lead to port-related employment. This need motivated the development of an interactive, multimedia software tool whose purpose is to showcase careers involved in the daily operation of a port, while simultaneously providing a detailed understanding of the breadth and complexity of modern port activities. This paper describes the simulation and various design decisions that were made in order to achieve the goals of educating students about port operations while also motivating them to pursue such careers.