Recommendations for confronting vocational education dropout: a literature review

Abstract

IntroductionReducing the high levels of early school leaving is one of the main challenges facing most of European education systems (European Commission 2011;Salva-Mut et al. 2014). Consequently, there is ample research and scientific literature related to this topic, as confirmed in reviews by De Wittea et al. (2013) and by Hovdhaugen et al. (2015). Despite this abundance of literature on dropouts, almost all of it is related to secondary education leaving. Research focusing on vocational education dropout is scarce, specially when compared with the amount of studies focused on secondary education and higher education (Dore and Lüscher 2011; Tanggaard 2013).Thus, it would be useful to first increase the amount of empirical evidence available regarding dropouts in vocational schools, and second, ensure that this empirical evidence provides useful information to help with making decisions about policies designed to curb the dropout rate in vocational education programs.The goal of this article is to spread the results of a literature review regarding vocational school dropouts. More concretely, it offers an analysis of the practical recommendations that came out of research projects on how to reduce the number of vocational AbstractDespite the importance of the subject of the early school leaving, there are few researches about success and dropout pathways in Vocational Education and Training, while there are many studies centered in other educational levels. This article aims to respond to the following questions: What role do practical recommendations play in research on vocational education dropout? To which specific areas of the educational intervention do these recommendations refer? What specifically are the main practical recommendations for reducing vocational education dropouts? A review of the existing scientific literature has been conducted. A total of 60 documents have been located and analyzed. Results suggests that the main body of recommendations are focused on advising and counseling of students while the recommendations aimed at changing the institutional environment and organization and the teaching staff competences and characteristics are of less concern.Keywords: Dropout, Early school, Leaving, Dropout prevention, Academic engagement Open Access© The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Cerda-Navarro et al. Empirical Res Voc Ed Train (2017) Cerda-Navarro et al. Empirical Res Voc Ed Train (2017) 9:17 education leavers. Early and sustained intervention is a key part of student success and the fight against dropouts because choosing to quit school before graduating is not a snap decision; rather it is the result of a proce...

Intención de abandono y abandono durante el primer curso de Formación Profesional de Grado Medio: un análisis tomando como referencia el concepto de implicación del estudiante ("student engagement")

“…que contribuirían al aumento de la vinculación del alumnado con la formación (reducción del absentismo y la indisciplina, mejora de las relaciones con profesorado y compañeros, aumento de la madurez profesional, etc. ), especialmente entre el alumnado en riesgo de abandono con trayectorias de indisciplina, desinterés y bajo rendimiento (Bruin y Ohna, 2013;Cedefop, 2016;Cerdà-Navarro et al, 2017;Raffi ngton, 2012).…”

“…En este sentido, es importante destacar que la falta de motivación en adolescentes está relacionada con la intención de abandono de los estudios (Legault, Green-Demers y Pelletier, 2006), y que la autopercepción de las competencias y los valores predicen las elecciones profesionales (Cham et al, 2014;Eccles, 2005). Al respecto, la literatura señala que tanto la motivación expresiva (me gusta) como instrumental (bien sea por trabajo o formación) con los estudios pueden reducir el riesgo de abandono (Fernández-Enguita et al, 2010;Serrano, Soler y Hernández, 2013;Masjuan, 2005;Navarro y Soler, 2014), mientras que formarse en profesiones no elegidas como primera opción o con las que no existe conexión aumenta el riesgo de abandono (Cedefop, 2016;Cerdà-Navarro et al, 2017;Diamond, 2007;Elffers et al, 2012).…”

“…Desde el punto de vista de la intervención educativa, pocos estudios se han centrado en las recomendaciones para reducir el abandono en la FPGM (Cerdà- Navarro et al, 2017). Al respecto, los resultados aquí ofrecidos sugieren espacios en los que focalizar las intervenciones basándose en el concepto de IE (Appleton y Silberglitt, 2019; Hofkens y Ruzek, 2019): las perspectivas profesionales, la implicación del alumnado y las relaciones con el profesorado.…”

“…En este sentido, parece necesario mejorar los procesos de orientación del alumnado previos a la elección de las profesiones (Cedefop, 2016;Cerdà-Navarro, 2019;Klotz, Billett y Winther, 2014), asegurando que el alumnado estudie profesiones con las que tiene alguna vinculación emocional y/o instrumental. También resulta imprescindible realizar intervenciones dirigidas a mejorar la calidad del profesorado, tales como promover el intercambio de experiencias y prácticas de éxito entre centros y docentes (Eizagirre-Sagardia, Altuna-Urdin y Fernández-Fernández, 2017; Jäppinen, 2010), mejorar la formación específi ca técnica y pedagógica (Sarramona, 2007;Vázquez, 2007) o perfeccionar los procesos de selección para promover la contratación de profesorado implicado y capaz de alentar y motivar al alumnado (Cerdà-Navarro et al, 2017;Quin, 2016).…”

Early termination of vocational training: dropout or stopout?

“…Other work has investigated the consequences of dropping out for a person's future employment trajectory (Rumberger and Lamb 2003;Campolieti et al 2010;Bradley and Lenton 2007;Oreopoulos 2007, for example). Although a vast set of studies examines the effects of dropping out, the literature on the decision process between succeeding in education and dropping out is rather scant (Cerda-Navarro et al 2017). Laporte et al (2013), for example, distinguish the outcomes from completing vocational training, continuing another apprenticeship and discontinuing training or dropping out.…”