Literacy Practice in Vocational Engineering Education: Is It Necessary? (A Case Study on the Concrete Construction Course)

Abstract

Literacy skills, both reading, and writing are often regarded as something that is not so important for vocational students to pay attention. In fact, in today"s rapid growth of industrial technology, workers are required to have adequate literacy skills that enable them to keep up with the developments. This study aims to investigate how does literacy was practiced in the vocational engineering field. This study was carried out using the semistructured interview. As participants in this study were 4 tutors which taken from Vocational Engineering Education Department. The data collected were the results of the interview, students" field work reports, and the results of field observation on the situation in classroom and workshop. This case study was carried out on concrete construction course. The result from this research sawn that students literacy practise in reading was rarely implemented. A habit of writing manually also rarely done, but students were accustomed to making written work reports with computer technology-based tools. The lack of active reading practice with a good understanding brings difficulties for students to meet the achievement of competencies. Practical students did a lot of misunderstanding on literacy in the form of technical symbols. These were serious problems in engineering field because failure in reading symbols can bring to failure construction.

The Bibliometrics Analysis of Literacy of Vocational High School Student in Building Construction Expertise

“…This data is a small amount for the standard of graduates at the education level who are indeed focused on its fields, so that Building Construction Expertise of Vocational Education is actually responsible for this data and need improvements in finding the efficient way to resolve this problem. In order to support the quality of graduates who are competent and competitively superior (Pertiwi & Ahmad, 2018;Supriyadi et al, 2019), one of the solutions is by integrating literacy to the learning components (Oktaviastuti et al, 2016;Rahmawati, 2017) but before going further, the development of research positions and various development opportunities are necessary to know (Zakiyyah et al, 2022). This is done in order to make the aligned research with the development and needs of students in workplace (Oliveira et al, 2019).…”