During 2008-2011, the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) funded a programme to build Australian VET research capacity and rejuvenate what has been seen as the existing "greying" researcher pool. This paper is a reflective narrative about experiences of constructing the programme with a specific focus on the mentoring…

Evaluations of vocational education and training (VET) programs play a key role in informing training policy in Australia and elsewhere. Increasingly, such evaluations use observational data from surveys or administrative collections to assess the effectiveness of VET programs and interventions. The difficulty associated with using observational…

Quantitative research in vocational education and training (VET) is routinely affected by missing or incomplete information. However, the handling of missing data in published VET research is often sub-optimal, leading to a real risk of generating results that can range from being slightly biased to being plain wrong. Given that the growing…

This paper is a preliminary investigation of the place that theory plays in vocational education and training (VET) research. Vocational education and training is an academic discipline, whose theory base has not previously been analysed in detail. The VET research community considers itself to be somewhat undervalued both by the broader education…

Vocational education and training (VET) has returned to the list of policy priorities for education in Africa after an absence of a quarter of a century, yet there has been no new research that overturns the existing orthodox position that such provision, whether during or after schooling, is inefficient and ineffective. This paper addresses this…

"Impact" is a notion that is not very well understood in research. Within Australian higher education, it has been bandied about within such frameworks as the "Research Quality Framework" ("RQF") and Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). Vocational education and training (VET) research is not immune from these movements, and increasingly,…

Mixed methods had been heralded as the third methodological movement with several authorities from across an array of discipline fields contributing to a growing body of literature and theoretical developments. The discipline fields which are showing high levels of acceptance for mixed methods are those related to education, health and nursing,…

"Transformative learning" is a term used by Mezirow (1991) and his followers to designate a specifically "adult" kind of learning that involves shifts in how learners view the world and themselves. New research into learning in VET suggests that in some subject areas transformative learning may play more than an incidental role. Among the…

The paper reports on a study examining the issues facing vocational education and training (VET) practitioners who aspire to undertake formal research and move towards publishing their research. Research participants were drawn from attendees at a publishing workshop that was mounted at the 2008 conference of the Australian Vocational Education…