Health care reform is changing the way in which health care is provided and altering the role of allied health professionals, especially nurses. This report examines how education can be responsive to the emerging needs of nurses and other allied health professionals. The diverse settings in which diverse populations are served requires the…

Quality system awards offer blueprints for assessing quality in vocational education as well as in business and industry. The three most prestigious awards recognizing quality improvement in business and industry are the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award, Deming Application Prize, and ISO 9000 Registration. When comparing standards for the quality…

Future workers will need to develop global awareness and an understanding of competitive, cultural, and economic factors that influence ways of doing business to work in the international arena. Vocational education, the educational program area specifically designed to prepare students for work, must infuse international concepts into programs so…

Concerns over the quality of education in the United States and the increasing demands of international competition have resulted in increased calls for the development and implementation of industry-based skill standards. A series of 22 pilot projects that were initiated by the National Skills Standard Board to strengthen the education-employment…

Worker-oriented, job-oriented, and cognitive task analyses have all been used as tools for closing the gap between what curriculum teaches and what workers do. Although they share a commonality of purpose, the focus, cost, and practicality of task analysis techniques vary. Worker-oriented task analysis focuses on general human behaviors required…

Businesses, community agencies, career educators and counselors, churches, parents, and other community members are increasingly being approached to become actively involved in K-12 career education through school-to-work, tech prep, or other related programs. Community involvement in career education can assume many forms. Businesses can…

Changes in the workplace such as mergers, acquisitions, reengineering, and downsizing are forcing individuals to recognize the temporary nature of all jobs and develop what has been termed "career resilience.""Career resilience" differs from "career self-reliance" in that the former refers to individual career…

The changing workplace has altered workers' roles and forced them to assume primary responsibility for their own career development. Continued employment is increasingly being tied to lifelong learning and ongoing skill development. Just as workers are recognizing the need to ensure their marketability to employers, so too are employers facing…

Family literacy programs must acknowledge the family as the primary place of learning, and developers of family literacy programs and curricula must focus on the family unit as a whole, building upon the cultural and knowledge capital of the entire family and acknowledging gender and age power relationships within the family. Educators must…

Learning styles and the creation of effective learning environments are of emerging significance in education as the changing nature of work requires higher-order thinking skills. Although learning style may be simply defined as the way people come to understand and remember information, the literature is filled with more complex definitions of…

Societal trends and personal characteristics are facilitating movement from corporate to self-employment. The entrepreneurship movement is characterized by several trends that are influencing the way people work: such as younger workers expecting shorter-term commitments to work, expanding career options, opening of worldwide operations, and…

Service learning contextualizes student learning and provides an environment in which students can acquire organizational, team, problem-solving, and other skills and attitudes necessary for future work and learning. Although service learning has been classified as a form of work-based learning, students participating in service learning receive…

This newsletter attempts to clarify the importance of academic and vocational integration in relation to emerging pedagogy, teaching and learning practices, and school-to-work efforts. One misconception about academic-vocational integration is that new theories overshadow its value. However, current research on teaching and learning supports a…

Constructivism is the theory that people learn by constructing meaning through interpretive interactions with the social environment. Constructivist perspectives are a growing influence among educators seeking to help students connect learning with life experiences, making constructivism highly relevant to vocational and career educators. This…

Increasing globalization has spotlighted a range of international approaches to career and technical education (CTE), including the German dual system, the British National Vocational Qualifications and General National Vocational Qualifications, and Australia's Vocational Education and Training and Technical and Further Education systems. Across…