Search Results for
"education"

Using longitudinal data from the British National Child Development Study, this paper examines gender differences in the determinants of work-related training. The analysis covers a crucial decade in the working lives of this 1958 birth cohort of young men and women - the years spanning the ages of 23 to 33. Hurdle negative binomial models are used to estimate the number of work-related training events lasting at least three days. This approach takes into account the fact that more than half the men and two thirds of the women in the sample experienced no work-related training lasting three or more days over the period 1981 to 1991. Our analysis suggests that reliance on work-related training to improve the skills of the work force will result in an increase in the skills of the already educated, but will not improve the skills of individuals entering the labor market with relatively low levels of education.

Federal and state legislation encourages the development of industry skill standards to improve the link between educators and employers and better define skill and curricular needs. However, some education reformers fear that a strong focus on the needs of business through industry standards will thwart education reform. The authors use an analysis of 22 skill standards pilot projects to reach mixed conclusions. The majority of standards appear to clash with the goals of broader education reform, although a small number of the projects could have positive effects.

The explosion of knowledge coupled with a more diversified society have led to a new set of demands on dentists. For more than 20 years, dental educators and the profession have been concerned about the pressure on the university to ensure that every new graduate is fully competent to enter a dental practice independently and successfully. This paper reviews some of the innovations which are being employed to attempt to deal with these concerns. There is no one formula that can answer these concerns. Postgraduate training in general dentistry is becoming more wide-spread and may need further investigation. The main focus of this paper is on trends in formal advanced postgraduate training in general dentistry.

[No abstract available]

We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the German Socio-economic Panel to calculate comparable measures of intergenerational correlations of earnings, hours, and education in the United States and in Germany. Our results indicate that there is remarkable similarity across the two countries in the correlations of earnings and of annual work hours of fathers and sons. The corresponding correlations for daughters and mothers are stronger in the United States than Germany, most likely due to the greater labor market integration of women in the United States. We also find that intergenerational correlations in educational attainment are considerably stronger in the United States.

Registrars in general practice have to submit an audit project as one of four parts of summative assessment. A criterion-referenced marking schedule has been developed in the West of Scotland, consisting of five independent criteria all of which have to be judged above minimum competence to pass. A system was developed to test the instrument using a marking exercise which calculated the sensitivity and specificity of the assessment process, for different combinations of assessors. One hundred and two registrar audit projects were then assessed by three independent assessors. Ninety-two (90%) passed and 10 projects (10%) were referred back to the registrar as being below minimum competence. After resubmission six projects (6%) passed, two projects (2%) were still below minimum competence, and two (2%) were not resubmitted. A referral process for assessing the audit projects of general practice registrars has been developed to maximize the opportunity of finding a project below minimum competence.

The network apprenticeship education allows the immediate application of the newest information in the textile and clothing industry. A project of the Tevanake development center that started in 1995 aims to develop a high quality export collection that gives emphasis on product quality and expertise. The network comprises of a school with instruction in sewing and an institute of technology administered by a polytechnic and with good resources for technical testing of fabric. A college level institute of business studies is selected to provide a market research in the export.

With investment in human capital an urgent economic imperative in America's quest for competitiveness, policymakers and analysts have focused on the bottom half of the labor force. In doing so their vision of literacy has been constricted by workplace needs. The literacy discourse is framed in terms of what workplaces, not adults, need. The curriculum follows efficiency criteria, not straying from the workplace context. I argue that this view of the problem fits Bhola's motivational-developmental/structural-developmental explanation of how national governments view the problem of adult literacy. I argue further that this workplace-based approach to illiteracy leaves the root causes of the problem - such as inequality of opportunity in the society - substantially intact, and that what is needed is a grander conception in line with Dewey's vocationalism and consistent with his democratic ideal. © 1997 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in education. Published by Blackwell Publishers.

In the last decade in Australia there has been a significant emphasis placed on vocational education and training. More recently within this context there has been renewed interest in apprenticeship training which has both formal learning (in a technical and further education college), and informal learning (in the workplace) components. This article, which draws on the perspectives of both apprentices and their workplace trainers from six industrial sites, is focused on the extent to which apprentices and their workplace trainers perceived the workplace to be a learning context. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analysed. The findings of the study indicated that, in a context where production is valued over learning, a number of effective learning processes are underdeveloped and undervalued. © 1997 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This paper summarizes and reports on a study of the patterns of destinations followed by eligible leavers at the end of year 11 for 59 of the 61 secondary schools in the English Midlands county of Derbyshire. The study examines the data for more than 10 000 eligible leavers in 1991 and 1992 by use of multiple regression analysis, examining patterns of association between three main destination categories (staying on, becoming economically active, unemployment) and three key variables (academic performance, low income, local unemployment). Although a number of highly significant patterns of association were found, their absence in some cases and imperfectness in others raise major questions about factors influencing young people's decisions at 16, and their appropriateness. In particular, the driving forces behind the boom in staying on are considered. This is undertaken by more detailed examination of the destination patterns of several schools, notably those whose patterns diverge to an aberrant degree from the predicted range for schools with the same characteristics. These analyses are supplemented by findings from interviews with a small sample of eligible leavers from the 1992 cohort in six of the schools analyzed. The study introduces the hypothesis that the absence of association between staying on and the proportion of pupils from low-income households reflects a complex pattern of behaviour among pupils not qualified for advanced study, and that this contributes substantially to explaining why, in some cases, over 50 per cent of the variance in staying on cannot be traced to academic performance. The dilemmas faced by this group are considered, and some possible implications of the ways in which they respond to them are discussed. © 1996 Routledge 0267-1522.