The world of work is changing rapidly and employers increasingly critique the preparation of incoming graduates, with only 11 percent agreeing students have the competencies needed to succeed in the workplace. Add to this picture low college completion rates and high remediation rates and the story is clear: too many students are graduating high school unprepared for college or career.
Educators across the nation are grappling with how to better prepare students to succeed in the workforce, and their efforts are supported by recent federal legislation. However, the rapidly changing workforce makes it challenging to come to consensus around what skills students should have when they leave high school. What does it mean to be “career ready,” and how can such a complex and evolving concept best be assessed and supported?
In an effort to address these questions, Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Appalachia convened representatives from all ten RELs together with nationally renowned experts for a workshop to discuss how educators and researchers in each region are addressing the development and measurement of career readiness, and to share ideas and resources for how to improve and sync these efforts nationally.
Louise Yarnall
SRI Author
Working Stronger and Smarter: A Handbook on Theory and Techniques for Developing Employability Skills for Technicians
This exploratory study scanned past reports from both education and workplace studies, and conducted a set of in-depth interviews with technician workforce experts over 18 months. In total, we reviewed 273 articles and conducted interviews with 40 educators, employers, and recent graduates from technician programs. To examine how skill expectations and instruction aligned or differed across technician fields, both the scan and interviews focused on two contrasting fields—information technology and advanced manufacturing, and the related fields of computer science and engineering. This study aimed to answer questions about what drives the demand for employability skills, which skills are most important for technicians, what learning principles and instructional practices support their development, and what approaches to employability skills development can support improved diversity in technician fields.
Designing Smartphone Microlessons to Improve the Cybersecurity Workforce
This is a poster presented at the 4th annual Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace principal investigators’ meeting.
CIRCL Primer: Data science education
This primer is an overview of the early state of data science education in grades K-12.
Lessons Learned From Early Implementations of Adaptive Courseware
To address the urgent need to improve student outcomes in developmental and general education courses, higher education institutions are turning to new learning technologies. Prominent among these is adaptive learning courseware that uses computer algorithms to parse learning analytic data collected as students interact with online learning environments. These adaptive algorithms then determine the student’s next learning activity and can be used to generate personalized feedback, study reminders, content recommendations, and real-time progress dashboards that both students and instructors may review.
Empowering Adults to Thrive at Work: Personal Success Skills for 21st Century Jobs. A Report on Promising Research and Practice
This report is geared toward leaders in education, industry, workforce development, and human services interested empowering working age adults to build sustainable 21st century careers. Personal success skills are the foundational capacities that all adults need to thrive in the workforce, beyond technical and disciplinary knowledge. As part of a multi-pronged approach, strengthening personal success skills can increase adults’ ability to get good jobs and keep them. From interviews with experts and a review of research literature, the report provides resources and recommendations to advance practice, research, and policy.
Big Foot or Footprint Tracking? How Employer Footprint Shapes Education Partnerships
Understanding the employer footprint, or the number of regional companies who hire local graduates by field, shapes partnership activities in career pathways. Critical for constructing realistic memoranda of understanding, the “footprint” perspective can help researchers critically review data from environmental scans, design realistic partnership activities and track progress.
AR-Mentor: Augmented Reality Based Mentoring System
AR-Mentor is a wearable real time Augmented Reality (AR) mentoring system that is configured to assist in maintenance and repair tasks of complex machinery, such as vehicles, appliances, and industrial machinery. The system combines a wearable Optical-See-Through (OST) display device with high precision 6-Degree-Of-Freedom (DOF) pose tracking and a virtual personal assistant (VPA) with natural language, verbal conversational interaction, providing guidance to the user in the form of visual, audio and locational cues. The system is designed to be heads-up and hands-free allowing the user to freely move about the maintenance or training environment and receive globally aligned and context aware visual and audio instructions (animations, symbolic icons, text, multimedia content, speech). The user can interact with the system, ask questions and get clarifications and specific guidance for the task at hand. A pilot application with AR-Mentor was successfully built to instruct a novice to perform an advanced 33-step maintenance task on a training vehicle. The initial live training tests demonstrate that AR-Mentor is able to help and serve as an assistant to an instructor, freeing him/her to cover more students and to focus on higher-order teaching.
Applying the Brakes: How Practical Classroom Decisions Affect the Adoption of Inquiry Instruction
If college science instructors are to use inquiry practices more in the classroom, they need both professional support to foster comfort with the pedagogy and practical ways to engage students in inquiry. Over a semester, we studied 13 community college biology instructors as they adopted bioinformatics problem-based learning (PBL) modules in their classrooms. The study used a diffusion of an innovation theoretical framework and a systematic model for examining faculty decision making around instructional materials adoption.
