Career-Technical Education Research News

Marisa Castellano and Kirsten Sundell, principal investigators of Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in CTE Programs of Study, recently talked to Catherine Imperatore of the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE). Their project is evaluating the implementation of federal education policy that was mandated in October 2006 in the reauthorization of the Perkins legislation. This new mandate is known as programs of study (POS), and this study measures its impact on student academic and technical achievement. This conversation took place after a recent site visit to one of the school districts participating in their study.

Here’s an excerpt from their conversation:

MC: Well, there are three areas of interest to the field that we wanted to talk about in this podcast. And those are project-based learning, a culture of support for success and use of technology.

I’ll begin about the project-based curriculum. One of the schools we visited has a project-based curriculum in which the whole school takes on a major project each year. And for this year, what we saw was in the science class, students are hooked in to a NASA project where they get a chance to control a radio telescope that NASA has that’s gathering astronomical data. And students are learning how to analyze the data and record it in a computer software program. So they’re work together, they’re learning team participation and problem-solving skills. And the results are useful in the real world; they’re included in a database of scientific knowledge about astronomy. There are schools all across the country that are involved in this NASA project. But at this school because they do school-wide project-based learning, this project has been integrated into other classes, including Spanish, construction, engineering, botany, culinary … all of them have created assignments around this project. For example, in culinary, what kind of a diet do astronauts need? And in botany, what kind of plants grow in space?

Read more about Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in CTE Programs of Study at the NRCCTE website. Read the transcript here.

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