Context: Aiming at gaining knowledge about students' thoughts and actions in deciding to stay in or drop out of an educational programme, an empirical study was conducted on dropout among 18-24-year-old students in VET and basic general adult learning.Approach: In order to pursue this aim, the study combined two sets of data: weekly student surveys and interviews with these same students. While the surveys provide a weekly snapshot of the students' thoughts regarding the probability of them continuing in the programme, their satisfaction with the educational programme as a whole, the specific lessons they attend, and the atmosphere at the school, the interviews contribute with detailed descriptions of the students' thoughts on the same matters.Findings: Based on the students' answers over an eight-week period, it was possible to trace a graph illustrating changes in the students' attitudes. These graphs can be placed within four categories of development: the stable, the positive, the unstable, and the negative. The latter can furthermore be differentiated as reflecting a stable decline, a fluctuating decline, or a sudden decline. In the interviews, the aim was to elicit the individual students' thoughts and actions at the points when their graphs took a turn.
Conclusions:The findings show that the students' thoughts and actions concern matters both inside and outside the school. Furthermore, seemingly trivial matters in the * Corresponding author: viaa@edu.au.dk ISSN: 2197-8646 http://www.ijrvet.net 112 Aarkrog, Wahlgren, Larsen, Mariager-Anderson, Gottlieb students' lives are shown to have a potentially decisive influence on the students' thoughts about staying in or dropping out of a programme. These findings confirm the importance of focusing on students' decision-making processes in research on dropout. However, further research is needed to increase understanding of processes leading to decisions to drop out of education, including the qualification of methods to capture these processes.
In 2008, the European Council agreed on a Resolution on better integrating lifelong guidance into lifelong learning strategies. The Resolution promoted lifelong guidance as a policy to support people during the multiple transitions provoked by a more volatile labour market. However, when looking into the guidance policy of Denmark, the Resolution does not seem to have taken effect. Whereas, the career guidance system is relatively developed in terms of transitions from basic schooling into youth education and from youth education to higher education, when it comes to transitions during a working life, adult career guidance structures are patchy and scattered across different policy areas and institutions. The objective of this article is to investigate the potential of adult career guidance as a support structure for Lifelong Learning, career transition and labour market mobility. To this end, we draw on Holzkamp's concept of 'disruption of the cyclicity in everyday life' to analyse working life narratives. We focus on the potential contact points between the individual and public structures supporting working life transitions. This article hereby contributes to ongoing discussions concerning access to career guidance as part of a social contract underlying flexible labour markets.
Dropout is a serious problem within education. This article reports on an intervention project, titled "New Roles for the Teacher-Increased Completion Rates Through Social Responsibility," which sought to reduce nonattendance and dropout rates in the Danish adult educational system by improving teachers' competences. This goal was pursued by engaging teachers in training programs aimed at improving their relational competences. The data showed that these focused training programs have an effect on the educational culture at the colleges and on the teachers' attitudes toward the importance of reducing drop-out rates. As a consequence, the teachers acted more consistently and purposefully to prevent dropout, and a positive effect of the intervention on drop-out rates was documented.
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