Thesis (MTech (Business Administration)--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2018. / In South Africa the government, industry and communities have placed pressure on Higher Education Institutions to deal with general skills shortage: whilst they prepare students to meet requirements and standards which industry expects. Universities of Technology are empowering students with theory, combining it with practical experience to generate graduates that are ready to meet industry’s demands and professional expectations. However, it has not proved easy to place students.The researcher has attempted to establish from companies the reasons the challenges and barriers posed during the Work Integrated Learning process. Work-Integrated Learning is important in bridging the gap between graduate attributes and industry expectations and the significant role that it plays in bridging the gap between graduate attributes and industry expectations. The workplace is a source of learning for students.The feedback from industry supervisors should be seen as an integral part of assessing students’ readiness for the world of work. The purpose of this research is to ascertain how managers deal with students during the Work-Integrated Learning period.The results of the study create foundation for future developments and research. It will also inform the development of an effective and innovative Work-Integrated Learning curriculum that is more supportive academically, and that encourages professional excellence and produces work-ready graduates. A qualitative research method was used in the study. Fifteen financial services managers from different companies were individually interviewed. Ethical approval for the study was sought and obtained. The results demonstrated that the managers experienced mixed feelings regarding their experience when supervising students in their respective companies. A closer examination of the managers’ responses, however, revealed that they had high expectations of students that participated in WIL, coupled with the quality of training provided by the Higher Education Institutions. These expectations include the following: effective time management, especially when reporting for work; regular attendance and team work, good and effective communication between company and the hosting university; and for WIL students to work independently, were all regarded as important.Although some managers had positive experiences of supervising students, there were those that expressed concerns about students’ levels of work readiness, as some indicated that students lacked self-confidence, while others raised concerns about students’ attitudes and lack of work ethics. It is recommended that the WIL programme should include activities that will enhance students’ confidence, independence and work-effectiveness. A collaborative effort should be made between various stakeholders that are involved in WIL: The need to give feedback to students on a full range of skills and competencies in the workplace, has not been extensively studied; hence an attempt by the researcher to establish some of the industry managers’ experiences in this regard.

Aprendizagem é uma política pública de inserção do jovem no mercado de trabalho por meio do veículo da formação profissional. Sistematizada durante o Estado Novo com a promoção do patronato, foi revigorada durante as iniciativas de reforma do Estado no início do século XXI mediante a ascensão dos discursos de investimento social privado e da emergência do terceiro setor. Observa-se que, a despeito de vozes multilaterais que demandam por mão de obra qualificada, a política pública no Brasil é caracteristicamente assistencial, relevando a qualificação para o trabalho como uma prioridade secundária. Este estudo aborda as relações de forças firmadas entre os atores ao longo da trajetória desta política pública com o objetivo de investigar suas transformações, bem como a manutenção de suas características originais, como a relação do Estado brasileiro com o jovem na condição de risco social. Tratando-se de um tema transdisciplinar, cuja investigação se presta à contribuição de ciências humanas como a educação, a sociologia e a ciência política, a Aprendizagem brasileira é analisada com o emprego de uma avaliação sistemático-comparativa da política pública em outros países em apoio ao institucionalismo histórico como estratégia de metodologia de pesquisa. / Apprenticeship is a public policy to insert youth in the labor market through vocational education. Structured during Estado Novo regime, with employers support, was invigorated in the initiatives of public reform administration in the beginning of the XXI century by the upraise of the private social investment speech and the third sector. As seen, despite multilateral voices which demand skilled workers, the Brazilian public policy is characteristically assistance, emphasizing the work qualification as a secondary priority. This study presents the strength relations among players through the path of the public policy with the aim of find its changes, as well the maintaining of its original characteristics, as the Brazilian State way of dealing with youth in social risk condition. As a transdisciplinary theme, which demands the support of other human sciences as education, sociology and political science, the Brazilian apprenticeship is investigated using a systematic-comparative analysis of the public policy in other countries to support the historical institutionalism as methodological research strategy.

This thesis explores the skill sets of the current American workforce, the skills required in modern, technically advanced U.S. manufacturing facilities, and the multiple approaches postsecondary education has employed to bridge the gap between the two. Millions of dollars are spent each year educating and training the incumbent workforce without any definitive measure of whether the financial investment or effort is actually providing a return. To illustrate, organizations typically require a projected return-on-investment (ROI) before committing funds to a project. However, the same approach does not seem to be applied when investing in human capital for the purpose of improving the technical skills required of the incumbent workforce in manufacturing. Training efforts and effectiveness are typically measured by the amount of training dollars spent and some form of post-training satisfaction survey. Adding to the dilemma is the fact that postsecondary education and workforce development organizations do not have performance metrics that align with manufacturing or industry metrics. The misalignment becomes more evident when trying to determine if the funding is actually paying off once an incumbent worker completes their training and returns to the shop floor. This project sought to determine if a return on training dollars could be quantified and measured so that industry can discern whether training is value-added or if postsecondary training providers should better align their product with customers’ expectations. Experiments were conducted with incumbent production workers to determine if an educational intervention translated to a quantifiable return on an organization’s training investment. Measurements in the time it took to repair a piece of production equipment were taken and compared to post-intervention times for the same activity to determine if hypothesized improvements actually occurred. Data was also collected and analyzed to determine if incumbent workers’ prior maintenance experience had an impact on the reduction of time to repair the production equipment. The experiment illustrated a statistically significant difference in the repair times for those who received the intervention. The second phase of the experiment that sought to determine if prior maintenance experience was beneficial to improving repair times did not support the hypothesized outcome.

Orientador: Rogério Galante Negri / Coorientador: Jorge Kennety Silva Formiga / Banca: Vivian Silveira dos Santos Bardini / Banca: Lucas Hidenori Okamura / Resumo: Esta pesquisa buscou propor um protocolo para funcionamento de uma ferramenta de auxílio no processo de ensino/aprendizado. Tal protocolo é construído com base nos conceitos de identificação e preenchimento de lacunas de aprendizado, identificadas por intermédio de sucessivos testes rápidos (quiz) que são aplicados durante o desenvolvimento das disciplinas. A fim de verificar o potencial da proposta, e assim motivar a implementação da ferramenta em questão, foi realizado um estudo de caso envolvendo duas turmas de duas disciplinas distintas de graduação da Faculdade Anhanguera de São José dos Campos. A eficácia do processo de ensino investigado foi verificada mediante análises estatísticas, se utilizando dos testes de "Wilcoxon" que visava comparar se houve melhora entre os quizzes do mesmo assunto; "Iteração de uma amostra" que buscou verificar se as melhoras e pioras acontecem de forma aleatória; e "χ^2 para uma amostra" que verificou se a melhora difere com relação ao comportamento mediano esperado. E pôde-se observar resultados favoráveis ao método proposto, o que demonstra eficácia do protocolo, objeto desta pesquisa / Abstract : This project looked for a protocol for the operation of an aid tool in the teaching / learning process. The protocol is based on the concepts of identifying and filling learning gaps, high school sessions, quick tests and tests are applied during the development of the disciplines. In order to verify the potential of the proposal, as well as to motivate the implementation of the tool in question, a case study was carried out on the two classes of undergraduate courses of the Anhanguera Faculty of São José dos Campos. The investigation of the teaching process investigated was used as a statistical database using "Wilcoxon" tests that aimed to compare if there was improvement between the quizzes of the same subject; "Iteration of a sample" that sought to verify if the improvements and worsen happen in a random way; and "���� 2 for one sample" that verified if the improvement differs with respect to the expected median behavior. And it was possible to observe favorable results to the proposed method, which demonstrates effectiveness of the protocol, object of this reasearch / Mestre

In 2012, National Research Council published a new science education framework that explains the science practices and its importance in understanding the process of knowledge development. The students were expected to engage in all the practices by grade 12. All science teachers need some kind of support to improve their understandings of these science practices (NRC, 2012). An important key component of engaging teachers in scientific investigations is to have the teacher participate in a research laboratory experience (NRC, 1996). Research Experiences for Teachers programs (RET) serve as a promising form of professional development to achieve this goal. These programs allow teachers to experience scientific inquiry. The context of the study was a Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program supported by National Science Foundation It was located in an United States university Environmental Engineering program. There were five preservice and ten inservice teachers in this research. In addition, there were six professors and eight graduate students who served as mentors. Each teacher worked with a specific professor and graduate student mentor in their research projects that are related to the management of the nitrogen cycle, provision of clean water, or urban infrastructure improvement. Also, four professors from engineering and science programs were interviewed to find out what each science practice means to them. The research design of this study was mixed methods that combined quantitative and qualitative research approaches into a single study. In this study, two teachers were selected for the case study based on their experiences and improvements. The study utilized different data sources such as surveys, interviews, observations, and documents. Each research question was addressed based on the results of overall analysis of all the teachers, as well as the results of each case. To find out whether there was a statistically significant difference between the pre-, mid-, and post teacher surveys, repeated measures ANOVA was used for each item. In addition, for the items that showed a statistical difference a Tukey test was conducted to find -which surveys -were significantly different from each other. Also, partial eta squared effect size was calculated for each item. Professor and graduate students' surveys were analyzed by a repeated measures ANOVA and Tukey tests. All interviews were transcribed by the researcher. The data from the interviews were coded and analyzed using a qualitative analysis software. In order to analyze the data in the observations, coding of the qualitative data procedure was employed. The teachers' poster presentations were evaluated by using the researcher-created rubric that has the criteria for each expected part of the poster presentation. The findings of this research suggest that teachers have naive understandings of science practices before they participate in an RET program because they do not have opportunities to learn what those practices mean. The findings also suggest that the teachers still have naive understandings after they participate in an RET program. This is a very important contribution to the literature, in that it is difficult for the teachers to teach those practices in their classrooms if they do not have complete and appropriate understandings of what those practices actually mean. The findings also indicated that teachers' participation in the RET program helped them to improve their abilities to engage in science practices but they need more experience, knowledge, and abilities to engage in the specific practices where they had least improvements. The analysis also indicated that the teachers who actively engaged in the science practices, had productive discussions with the graduate student mentors and participated the quick lessons they gave, read the literature for their research, used new techniques and methods, and participated in the research group meetings improved more on the abilities of engaging in science practices compared to the teachers who did not have the opportunity to participate in the practices because of the structure of their projects, had low interest, and received most of the information directly from the graduate students.

This study assessed the dilemmas associated with apprentice assessment systems in the New Apprenticeship Training and Assessment System (NATAS), (State based system), and the Modular system (National system) in Western Australia. Although both were described as competency-based systems these different schemes showed the variations that existed under this general description of training and assessment. The Modular system was a competency-based system which emphasised outcomes rather than the process of training.The emphasis on the process of training was what sustained decades of traditional apprenticeship training. The competency-based approach, discussed in detail later, was a performance-based methodology. Conceptually the apprentice either could perform a given task or task element as set by a specific performance criterion, or s/he could not. The person was judged, based upon the performance outcome to be either competent or incompetent. The basic assumption was that the person could not be partially competent.The competencies approach was a cornerstone of the Australian National training provision. It was administered by the National Training Board through an Australian Standards Framework. The key target group in this assessment of the competency area and the focus of this study was the young apprentice who would become a skilled tradesperson in a relatively short period of four years.Supporting the apprentices in the NATAS system were monitors, lecturers, and employer's members of these groups, who together with apprentices were used to gain insights into the new training initiatives.A previous study Williamson, Lowe and Boyd (1990) had looked at the Western Australian New Apprenticeship and Training System (NATAS). The intention was to develop ideas further and in greater depth using qualitative methodology in the area of effectiveness of the training and ++ / assessment system. The research also had critically assessed the Modular system (National) which in most cases progressively replaced NATAS during the period of the research.

This thesis examines the learning preferences and learning strategies of apprentices, and the contexts within which they learn in their workplaces. Since the end of the 1980s Australian vocational education and training (VET) structures and processes have undergone radical change in attempts to develop skills in the workforce that will ensure enterprise, national, and international competitiveness. A major strategy in the national reforms has been the encouragement of flexible delivery as a means through which workplace-based learning can be accessed by a larger number of workers in ways that are cost-efficient, and that reduce the amount of time that workers spend away from their jobs. Although flexible delivery has been championed by governments and industry alike, there has been little attempt to identify the preparedness of either learners or their workplaces for the demands of flexible learning. The thesis examines the economic context for these changes to VET, and also examines the literature available on workplace learning. Additionally, the thesis examines the conceptualisations of flexible delivery that are available in the literature, pointing to the possibility that the wide range of meanings associated with the term ‘flexible delivery’ may result in quite different practices and expectations. The thesis also examines the literature on independent learning and self-directed learning, and explores the concept of ‘client-focused’ flexible delivery. The study of learner preferences uses data collected from apprentices over a period of some years, in the four occupational areas commanding the highest number of apprentices in Australia. These occupational areas are Metals and Machining, Building, Electrical, and Hairdressing. These data on learning preferences are collected using the commercially available Canfield Learning Styles Inventory (CLSI). The data from the sample of 389 apprentices are analysed statistically through analyses of variance, and indicate that variables such as age, gender, and occupational area are related to learning preferences. Apprentices are shown by this analysis to prefer structured programs of instruction that are instructor-led, and to not have a high preference for independent learning or the development of their own learning goals. Additionally, they are shown to have very low preferences for learning through reading, preferring instead to learn through direct hands-on experience. While these characteristics are largely common among the four occupational groups, the Hairdressing apprentices are shown to have a slightly higher preference for independent learning and goal setting. Females are shown to have a higher preference than males for learning qualitative material through reading. Interestingly, the younger apprentices are shown to have a higher preference than the older ones for self-directed learning. Some possibilities for that finding are discussed. The research also shows that the learning preferences displayed by different groups of apprentices in any one program are much the same over time, providing some confidence that data generated from one group of apprentices can be used to make instructional decisions for future groups in the same program. The data are also factor analysed to indicate three major factors underlying apprentice learning preferences. The first factor indicates a Verbal–Non-verbal preference factor, with apprentices clearly preferring to learn through non-verbal means. A second factor is described as Structure–Content, with apprentices showing a preference for learning from structured programs in a structured environment. A third factor, Self-directed–Social preference, indicates apprentices preferring to learn through socially mediated presentations and contexts rather than through more independent forms of learning. Qualitative data are also generated through interviewing eight apprentices, and focusing on the learning strategies they employ while constructing knowledge in the workplace. That component of the research uses a modification of the Marland, Patching and Putt (1992a, 1992b) stimulated recall technique, and a set of learning strategies derived from the work of O’Malley and Chamot (1990) and Billett (1996a). The eight apprentices are drawn from the Metals and Machining, Electrical, and Hairdressing trades. The findings indicate that the learning strategies most often used by apprentices in the workplace are those associated with the construction of knowledge that is structured and provided by the instructor or learning program, and those that include social mediation of learning. Additionally, the strategies associated with demonstration and hands-on practice are most favoured. The qualitative data are confirmatory of the quantitative data. The research also indicates, through the apprentice interviews, that support for apprentice’s learning in their workplace is typically unplanned and haphazard. Their experience was sometimes characterised by a reluctance on the part of the workplace to acknowledge learning needs such as trialling and practice of new knowledge, or pro-actively seeking understanding from other more skilled workers. The learning preferences and learning strategies findings for apprentices, coupled with the findings of typically poor or unplanned support in the workplace, indicate that effective flexible delivery of training to apprentices in the workplace provides a number of challenges. These challenges, it is argued, demand strategies to be developed and implemented to prepare both learners and workplaces for effective engagement with flexible delivery. Using as a theoretical framework Kember’s (1995) two-dimensional model of open learning for adults, the thesis integrates the findings into a proposed two-dimensional model of learner and workplace preparedness for flexible delivery. The model provides for a Learner Development Space, a Workplace Development Space, and a Strategy Space. Within the Learner Development Space, focuses for the development of learner preparedness are identified in terms of self-directed learning, skills developments, and effective participation in a community of practice. Focuses for workplace development identified in the Workplace Development Space are those associated with development of training policies, training structures, and trainer skills and abilities. The Strategy Space then provides detail of seventy-nine specific strategies developed to enhance learner and workplace preparedness within each of the focuses identified.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 198-216).

This study examines how teaching is interactionally accomplished within a vocational program for students studying to become electricians. The data is drawn from video recordings of classroom lectures as well as hands-on instructions at construction work sites. The analysis of the classroom explores how the students exploit poetics and sequential structures of language including especially the Initiative-Response-Evaluation sequence tosupport, challenge or undermine teaching and to build alliances with or against peers. The analysis of the construction work sites focusses on how the teacher and the students use multimodal resources to create situations for teaching and learning. The analysis of the classroom focusses on how students launch different initiatives that compete with the instructional activities in the classroom. These initiatives emerge from and reveal the broad meaning potential inherent in linguistic forms. The analysis shows how structures and roles that are constitutive of the classroom as well as the emergent professional identity of the electrician provide resources for maintaining, challenging or even dissolving instruction.The analysis of the construction work site shows how artefacts, postures, talk, and spatial configurations are handled in relation to place, mobility, and action. In stark contrast with the classroom, students at the construction site compete for the teacher's attention and assistance. The analysis includes descriptions of collaborative moments between the teacher and the students as well situations where the teacher is interrupted and challenged by the students. Three frames are deployed to convey meaning, a professional, a mundane, and an educational. The professional frame involves higher or lesser degrees of manifested professional visions on part of the teacher as well the students. The mundane frame is characterized by playfulness which in turn can jeopardize the professional agenda. Instructions provide a tool for re-establishing an instructional setting where work related tasks can be executed.

M. Tech. Business Administration / Work Integrated Learning forms part of all the engineering programmes at the Universities of Technologies and need to be effectively and efficiently managed as poor management thereof could negatively affect the students and the throughput of the university as a whole. This study investigates the factors impacting the management of the Work Integrated Learning programme at a University of Technology. Such factors include the preparation, placement, registration, mentoring, and monitoring as well as the assessment and debriefing during the undertaking of Work Integrated Learning for engineering students at a Universities of Technology.