Apprenticeships remain an important source of skilled workers in Australia; however, commencements have not kept pace with the skills demand projected in the previous decade. During that same decade, undergraduate university enrolments grew considerably. In investigating whether young people who would previously have chosen an apprenticeship have…

Workplace learning in vocational education and training (VET) is often claimed to be an important metric to define "high-quality" programs, but outcomes beyond initial employment are not well understood. In this study, we estimate outcomes of upper-secondary-school VET programs with different levels of workplace learning in…

This article analyses the contribution of post-compulsory education and training systems to the development of literacy and numeracy skills across OECD countries. While there is extensive cross-country comparative research on the effects of primary and lower secondary education systems on aggregate skills levels, there has been little comparative…

The vast majority of American students are neither prepared nor sufficiently engaged to become science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-literate citizens or innovative STEM professionals (National Research Council, 2007; Carnegie Corporation and the Institute for Advanced Study, 2009; National Science Board [NSB], 2010; President's…

Research tells us much about the effects of primary and lower-secondary schooling on skills inequality, but we know less about the impact of the next stage of education. This article uses a differences-in-differences analysis of data on literacy and numeracy skills in PISA 2000 and SAS 2011/12 to assess the contribution of upper-secondary…

Purpose: The aim of this article is to explore the phenomenon of gifted migrants in vocational training and education. To date, migrant apprentices have been predominantly discussed from a deficit perspective. Special attention has been given to competence insufficiency and underperformance, as well as to migrant adolescents' lack of professional…

In vocational education, a challenging issue is to help apprentices build integrated knowledge from workplace training and school teaching. The present research proposes a learning design in which apprentices are required to write with a reciprocal peer-tutoring approach about situations they encountered in the workplace in order to help in…