Responsibility for career transition preparation

Summary The continuing need and desire for assistance in planning for, entering, and progressing in a career is well-documented over the past decade. Although assistance with finding and securing a job is a part of this need, it is but one aspect of the competencies needed by students to be aware of the world of work and how this world differs from the educational world they are leaving. The ability of students to adjust and contribute to many roles in their post-high school world is crucial for a successful and lasting transition.The competencies needed by students as they prepare for and implement their transition to the occupational world can serve as the focal point of the career guidance program in the high school. Such competencies must go beyond the acquisition of occupational information and job search and interview skills. Competencies expected of students must be those that will allow them to adjust, mature, and succeed in the world of work and allow them to satisfy the multiple roles they will have throughout their careers.School counselors must become an integral part of the program to assist students to acquire and use competencies that will ensure their successful adjustment and development in the occupational world. Career guidance programs must be expanded and maintained to meet the continuing needs of students and counselors must revive or renew the competencies and the skills necessary to serve students during their transition to the world of work.Edwin A. Whitfield is Associate Director, Division of Educational Services, Ohio Department of Education, Columbus, Ohio     

Monitoring the Use of a Staff Student Liaison Committee for Feedback in Quality Engineering Education

The paper explores the use of a staff student liaison committee (SSLC) as one of the mechanisms for assuring quality in civil engineering education. The School of Civil Engineering at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, is used as a case study. The school has a SSLC which meets about six times per year and has representatives of all undergraduate courses and some academic staff. It was thought that the SSLC was well regarded by staff and students and contributed to the learning experience of students within the school. A questionnaire was used to ascertain the views of staff and students regarding the effectiveness of the committee in promoting good quality education. The findings indicated that the SSLC was playing an important role, but that it was not as well regarded as academic staff thought, and that many students were not fully aware of its activities. The school has used the findings to adopt new methods of distributing information to the student body and for ascertaining student opinion, principally electronically.     

Real education in non-real time: The use of electronic message systems for instruction

Education in different communication media takes place with functional differences that have consequences for the course of instructional interaction. In this paper, we examine instructional interaction among people using a computer-based electronic message system, contrasting it with conventional face-to-face discussion in a college level class. Interaction via the non-real time message system contained multiple “threads of discourse,” a higher proportion of student turns to teacher turns, and other deviations from the “initiation-response-evaluation” sequences usually found in face-to-face classroom interactions. Based on the results of our contrast, we describe ways to organize instruction using electronic message systems to take advantage of new properties and to avoid shortcomings of these new instructional media.     

Science in the Trenches: An Exploration of Four Pre-service Teachers' First Attempts at Teaching Science in the Classroom

This paper explores four students' attempts at teaching science in the real world classroom during their initial student teaching practicum, including their struggles and successes. When pre-service teachers enter their initial practicum experience they are confronted with differing teaching philosophies of their own, their university professors, and their school mentors (Sullivan, Mousley & Gervasioni, 2000; John, 2001; Fu and Shelton, 2002). Within this situation, preservice teachers struggle to find their own niche of teaching science and learn to reflect as both learner and teacher (Kelly, 2000). Our goal as science teacher educators is to help pre-service teachers have an easy transfer from personal university experiences to teaching science in the real classroom environment while maintaining the integrity of newly learned teaching strategies (Segall, 2001). This work adds to and helps guide science teacher educators in identifying difficulties pre-service teachers' experiences in the transition from methods courses to practice.