This project applied the gap analysis problem-solving framework (Clark & Estes, 2008) in order to help develop strategies to increase completion rates at Travelor Adult School. The purpose of the study was to identify whether the knowledge, motivation and organization barriers were contributing to the identified gap. A mixed method approached…

Completion rates are an obvious performance indicator for the vocational education and training (VET) sector. Previously published figures indicated overall completion rates as low as 27%. One response to this is the argument that there are many students who do not need to complete their qualification as they acquire the skills they need without…

As community colleges face increasingly tight budgets and calls for a renewed focus on improving student outcomes in the form of graduation rates, colleges must address the concept of access. How much access to higher education can they continue to provide low-skilled students in adult education and similar programs? One way to ensure access to…

The annual Student Outcomes Survey collects information on the outcomes of two groups of students--those that have completed a qualification (graduates) and those that have completed only part of a course and then left the vocational education and training (VET) system (module completers). At the time of selecting the survey sample, insufficient…

This paper estimates vocational education and training (VET) course-completion rates, in order to fill a gap in performance measures for the VET sector. The technique the authors use is to track all VET course enrolments within a three-year window, centred on the year of interest. Then, using an absorbing Markov chain model for a VET course…

"Research Messages 2014" is a collection of summaries of research published by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) in 2014 in the context of changing economic, industrial, social and education conditions, organised under the following broad categories: (1) Productivity: to sustain and build Australia's human…

In 2005, the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) produced a statistical compendium examining vocational education and training (VET) students with a disability as a whole group; it also compared different disability groups, focusing on their participation levels, achievements and outcomes from VET in 2003 (Cavallaro et al.…

In Mexico there is no policy of lifelong learning; however, the idea of focusing on students and learning--especially on appropriate knowledge-acquisition skills at various points in one's life--is spreading through post-secondary education. Since about ten years ago, institutions of higher learning, mostly universities, have initiated…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 11th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2014), October 25-27, 2014, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) and endorsed by the Japanese Society for Information and Systems in…