Community colleges are the leaders in facilitating career and technical education (CTE), and faculty help develop program offerings on campus. This study explored faculty perceptions of community college CTE programs using the survey research method. Participants included 36 faculty members from various disciplines from 15 state colleges in…

One goal of undergraduate engineering education is to prepare students with the knowledge, skills, and decision-making strategies that are necessary for success in engineering practice. One proposed method to teach students these skills is to incorporate habits of mind into K-12 and undergraduate curricula. Habits of mind are the intelligent,…

In order to maintain the United States' global competitiveness and create new and innovative solutions to solve global challenges, more and diverse numbers of STEM graduates need to be attracted and retained in technical disciplines (Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century: An Agenda for American Science and Technology,…

Within increasing pressure on young people to perform successfully in work, there is a growing concern regarding their levels of numeracy (and literacy). Whether such concerns are founded is the basis of this paper. This paper reports on the numeracy practices undertaken by three young boatbuilders who were nearing the completion of their 4-year…

Governments and other stakeholders have become increasingly interested in assessing the skills of their adult populations in order to monitor how well prepared they are to meet the challenges of the new information world. The current paper provides an overview of the conceptual framework for the assessment of numeracy developed for the OECD's…

Information about how school principals operate pertains mainly to the actions of principals. However, the kinds of knowledge that the principalship demands have not been isolated as clearly, more often than not being conflated with actions. As principals' duties become more complex, it becomes more important to ground specific practices in robust…

The major purpose of a study was to identify the knowledge, skill, and cognitive process differences between expert and novice technicians on technical troubleshooting tasks. Identification of these differences was conducted through two investigations. Investigation 1 sought to describe differences in the declarative and procedural knowledge bases…

Faced with a shrinking labor pool and increasing competition, employers are beginning to take basic workplace skills training into their own hands. Such training involves (1) identifying skills-related job changes or problems; (2) building management and union support; (3) developing a strategy; (4) performing task analysis; (5) designing and…

Compares public and private sector recruitment behavior in Malaysia, focusing on employers' perspectives of higher education's functions. The public sector values academic records, whereas private industry seeks workers with experience and good affective skills. Both sectors want universities to produce graduates with problem-solving abilities.…

Problem solving skills such as patterning facts, locating problems, separating problems and solutions, and presenting effective written products are essential to success in the business community. Facts can be patterned using a grid relating a problem's effect at the individual, group, situational, and organizational level. Such a grid tests each…

Skills tutorials for first year engineering students at the University of New South Wales, Australia, were introduced in order to develop an awareness of certain conceptual skills commonly exercised by practicing engineers. Particular skills include the manipulation of information in different forms, translation from one form to another,…

Phase II of a project extended data collection and analytic procedures to develop a model of expertise and skill development for en route air traffic control (ATC). New data were collected by recording the Dynamic Simulator (DYSIM) performance of five experts with a work overload problem. Expert controllers were interviewed in depth for mental…

A cognitive task analysis was performed to analyze the key cognitive components of the en route air traffic controllers' jobs. The goals were to ascertain expert mental models and decision-making strategies and to identify important differences in controller knowledge, skills, and mental models as a function of expertise. Four groups of…

Instruction should emphasize generic skills as much as it does occupational or domain-specific skills. Generic skills enable people to: (1) cooperate and communicate for group problem solving; (2) identify and define problems in complex environments; (3) seek, acquire, and synthesize new information; and (4) adapt to changes in the problem-solving…