Reasons of students and apprentices to choose a training company in the dual system

This article sheds light on an understudied aspect of the transition from school to work: the choice of a training company. It presents findings from qualitative interviews with 69 secondary school students and apprentices from the German states of Berlin and Brandenburg, focusing on their reasons to choose a training company in the dual system. What reasons lead students and apprentices to choose a training company? The most common reason is personal impressions, which future apprentices obtain in their initial, personal encounters with a company and its staff. Students and apprentices often consider location, working atmosphere and soundness. Due to this study’s regional scope, its findings may not be fully generalisable on a national or international level. However, its findings may instigate further research in countries where people pursuing certain types of apprenticeship training have to apply to companies (e.g. Great Britain, Switzerland and Australia).     

Storybook models and achievement behavior of preschool children

The effects of orally presented storybook models on children's cognitive achievement behavior were assessed in two experiments. Experiment I involved 100 preschool-age children who were given one exposure to either a story depicting achievement behaviors by a male/female model, or a control story describing no achievement behavior. Subjects then were asked to perform a related achievement task. No significant modeling effects were found, but a significant relationship existed between the children's recall of the story content and their performance on the subsequent task. Experiment 11 employed 60 preschool-age children who were given repeated exposures (3 to 4) to, and group discussion of, the same achievement stories or non-achievement control story. A significant relationship was observed between type of story and type of solutions to the subsequent achievement task. These findings are discussed in the context of modeling theory, with practical implications.