<p>Although ABET has outlined educational outcomes to help prepare students with the necessary competencies to succeed in professional engineering practice, it is unclear how confident students are in their professional engineering skills. <i>Competency</i> refers to the<i>“generic, integrated and internalized capability to deliver sustainable effective performance in a certain professional domain, job, role, organizational context, and task situation.” </i>Understanding their competency provides students with a bridge to connect their academic experiences with their ability to perform their workplace duties. To help students assess their competency, I developed the Self-efficacy Inventory for Professional Engineering Competency (SEIPEC), an inventory that aims to measure engineering students’ self-efficacy for professional engineering competencies. Unlike other inventories in engineering that measure the academic experience or other self-efficacy inventories that do not focus on the engineering population, this career assessment is designed for college-level engineering students to evaluate their subjective readiness for successful performance in the workplace. </p> <p>SEIPEC is a tool for students to self-assess their professional competencies, aiming to empower students to become reflective about their learning and increase awareness of workplace competencies. SEIPEC was developed based on the American Association of Engineering Societies’ Engineering Competency Model (ECM). The ECM identifies factors that contribute to self-efficacy for professional engineering competency. ECM was developed using the Delphi method and encompasses a comprehensive list of competency statements that were approved by industry leaders and engineering educators to encapsulate the competencies needed for a professional engineer.</p> <p>The data include 434 complete responses from bachelor’s and master’s students at a Midwest research-intensive university. The sample represents 13 engineering disciplines, such as electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering, and includes 282 male and 146 female students, 48 first-generation students, and 63 international students. After the exploratory factor analysis and the confirmatory factor analysis, a four-factor model with 20 competency statements was validated as the measurement for self-efficacy for professional engineering competency. The four factors that contribute to the self-efficacy of professional engineering competency include (a) sustainability and societal impact, (b) health and safety, (c) application of tools and technologies, and (d) engineering economics. </p> <p>The SEIPEC tool has the potential to empower engineering students to reflect upon and connect their academic experience with professional competencies. SEIPEC would provide students with a method to self-evaluate their skills in addition to other assessment methods such as course grades and traditional engineering exams. <a>The results of self-assessment for professional engineering competencies could increase students’ awareness of professional competencies, thus helping students to become more intentional in connecting learning with their professional preparation. </a>Career advisors and counselors can also use this tool to guide career advising conversations revolving around students’ choice to pursue and prepare for engineering as a career path. </p>

<p>The purpose of this research was to investigate how work orientation (job, career, and calling) affects the professional life of leaders; and how leaders perceive their work regarding these three dimensions. In addition, this study aimed to relate work orientation to performance. Also, phenomenology approach allowed a deep investigation of the experience of leaders with regard to their work.</p><p> For this purpose, two surveys were used; one was on work orientation and the other on performance. After completion of the surveys, six participants were invited to participate in an in-depth interview. The participants were aligned with the calling orientation and had a high performance at work. They described their work as integrated into their lives, involving their families in decisions, helping people, and desiring to make a difference in this world. Also, the findings showed that people who live a calling feel that work and life have intertwined meanings. The motivation, well-being, connection with an organization, engagement with work, and having a purpose were factors that had significance for those who perceive work as a calling. The main results were that the participants faced new challenges, built new meanings and understandings about work during their careers. Each experience helped them to improve the next, while also improving their performance. The relationship between these factors revealed a cycle of meanings. The cycle represents the evolution of the creation of new meanings which defines how people perceive their work and how that influences performance. Furthermore, this study showed that it is possible to change the perception of work through goals, achievement, working context, the adversities faced, stages of life, and the work environment. All of these lead to new meanings and becoming aligned to different dimensions of work orientation. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

The objective of this Thesis is a theoretical analysis of the educational counselling system and an analysis of the contemporary educational counselling system at primary school facilities in Usti nad Labem. The theoretical part disserts upon a system of school counselling services and from its structure resulting educational counselling system at primary schools. Theoretical experiences are then transformed into practical analysis of the Usti nad Labem educational counselling system settings which is amended by an investigation in the participiant institutions and an empirical probe, having been made with the usage of survey questionnares, between educational counsellors at primary schools in the city.

While there is evidence about the relationship between career development and psychological outcomes, more work is needed to understand how career development is related to personal mental health outcomes in college students. Studying some of the social and cognitive predictors of self-efficacy, this study espouses a holistic perspective to career development and aims to better understand its impact on well-being. Using social cognitive career theory (SCCT) and Super's life-span, life-space theory, this study examines how social (e.g., parental support) and cognitive (e.g., career values awareness) factors influence career decision-making self-efficacy, and furthermore, how this impacts well-being in undergraduate students. Specific mediation hypotheses were assessed, including the mediating role of career values awareness in the relationship between parental support and career decision-making self-efficacy, and the mediating effect of career-decision-making self-efficacy on well-being. Data were collected from 1446 undergraduate students at a large Midwestern public land-grant university through an online survey. Using structural equation modeling to analyze the data, results indicated that: (a) career values awareness mediated the relationship between parental behaviors and CDMSE; (b) CDMSE mediated the relationship between parental behaviors and well-being; and (c) CDMSE mediated the relationship between career values awareness and well-being. In an alternative model, parental support and socioeconomic status (SES) were also found to be significant positive predictors of well-being. Post hoc analysis revealed that academic standing (i.e., year in school) did not moderate the relationship between CDMSE and well-being. Limitations of the study and recommendations for future research are suggested along with implications for clinical practice.

<p>  </p> <p>Mentorship has served as an effective strategy in helping African American college students persist at predominantly White institutions of higher education (Sinanan, 2016). African American students have reported finding these campus environments to be unwelcoming, even racist. These environmental challenges along with the challenges of unfamiliar academic terrain merge to form frequently formidable barriers to their satisfaction and success. The presence of African American mentors has helped African American students overcome the wide range of challenges they face on such campuses. This qualitative study analyzed the perceptions of African American mentors and mentees about the impact of mentorship on the college persistence of the mentees. The target mentorship community was situated at a private school in the Midwest. Semi-structured interviews were used to solicit the experiential knowledge of participants about their lived experiences. The data was codified and thematically analyzed. Six themes emerged from participant responses including (1) targeted mentorship and modeling, (2) belonging, (3) connections (4) advocacy, (5) racism and anti-Blackness, and (6) persistence. These themes fortify the existing research affirming mentorship as an invaluable tool in helping African American undergraduates persist through degree completion. The assertions and recommendations at the conclusion of the study are purposed to assist scholar-activists, university staff, and students with improving the conditions in which African American students’ study and push toward persistence.</p>

MEd (Educational Psychology) / Department of Foundations of Education / This study examined the impact of guidance and counselling on learning outcomes. The study was comparative study of two high schools in Vhembe district located in the Northern part of Limpopo Province, South Africa. A mixed method design was employed, consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches. For the quantitative part an experimental design and a questionnaire were used. Independent samples entailed t-tests to compare the performance of the experimental and control group, a chi-square of association was used to determine the presence/absence of alignment between career and subject choices after counselling, while paired samples t-tests were used to ascertain if there was any improvement in the performance of the two groups. In addition, written mark schedules of pre-test, post-test and a short questionnaire for learners were analysed quantitatively. For the qualitative component face-to-face, semi-structured interviews were used while the purposive sampling technique was used to select 8 Life Orientation teachers, of which 4 were from school A and the other 4 were from school B. In addition, 2 Life Orientation heads of department were interviewed on challenges in implementing Guidance and Counselling in the school curriculum. For the quantitative data analysis, the chi-square and t- test of association was used to determine if there was any difference in career and subject choices alignment and performance between learners exposed to counselling and those not exposed to the program. The overall mean scores were calculated, and the chi-square test was used to indicate if there was any significant difference in career choices and subject alignment and performance between the group that received guidance and counselling and the group which did not receive such support. Fifty learners from the two selected schools were randomly selected, whereby 25 were used for the experiment and the other 25 as a control group. The experimental results indicated that learners who were exposed to guidance and counselling showed improvement in their learning outcomes while those who were not exposed to counselling showed no improvement in their learning outcomes. The fact that group that received guidance and counselling improved suggest that guidance and counselling services should be strengthened in all schools through departmental policy review meetings. / NRF

The facilitator model for dual credit offers a way for student to earn directly transcripted credit to colleges and universities, overcoming many barriers faced by other dual credit models. Successful implementation of this model requires high degree of involvement from the cooperating institution. This IRB approved qualitative case study explored the needs of five teacher facilitators in both summer professional development and on-going support throughout the school year when implementing a facilitator model for dual credit with open-ended design coursework. Code-recode and axial coding techniques were applied to over 90 hours of transcribed data, artifacts, and observations from a seven month period to find emerging themes and offer recommendations for implementation.<p></p>