Preparing secondary vocational students for the future: Gaining insight in the fundamentals of learning behaviour as stepping stone to work

This doctoral dissertation focuses on students in secondary vocational education. More precisely, the preparation of students in their final year of secondary vocational education for the transition to the labour market and future learning. This doctoral project was started with a systematic review of the literature in order to identify interesting research gaps. Results of this literature review revealed that overall recent graduates land a job quite fast after leaving education and that differences in the ease of finding a job is related to the educational programme. However, these graduates are performing poorly on career development skills putting them at risk in the long term of their future career. Furthermore, this study revealed that the role of structural factors in secondary vocational education and personal resources of students related to learning in the future career remained an uncharted area. In order to investigate these two gaps, a three-wave longitudinal research was conducted. In total, 72 secondary vocational schools were selected out of a list of all secondary schools offering a vocational track in Flanders. These schools were selected because of the dual structure of the programmes they offered (i.e., the combination of taking lessons in school and practice skills during internships). Principals of 36 schools agreed to participate in the study giving access to 2561 final year students, who were invited to complete three questionnaires: two pertaining the classroom context and one pertaining the internship context. In the first empirical study, the gap in the knowledge about the role of structural factors in education was addressed by testing the active learning hypothesis of the job demands-control model in classroom settings as well as the internship setting. Findings of this study demonstrated that autonomy in classes and autonomy and workload in internships are related to learning behaviour. The second empirical study addressed the gap pertaining to students' personal resources by focussing on students' motivation to learn, which was defined in accordance with the goal orientation theory. More precisely, it was investigated whether students' goal orientation changed during internships and whether this change remained over time. Results indicated that students' goal orientations are higher shortly after the internships but decreases again towards the end of the school years. Summarised, this doctoral dissertation contributed to the research field by focussing on students stemming from secondary vocational education and by investigating the added value of the dual structure of the programme (i.e., the combination of classes and internships).

Jaar van publicatie:2020

Toegankelijkheid:Closed