The participants of this research study will be 12th grade high school students and teachers involved in the school to work programs. It is expected that twelfth grade students should have benefited the most from the school to work programmes. These students will be randomly selected from high schools in both the public and private sectors. The questionnaires will seek to establish whether the high school students are able to adjust to their forth coming careers.
High school teachers will also be necessary in the study to establish their views and attitudes towards the school to work programs. These teachers will be randomly selected from the schools that will be involved in the study. The interviews will seek to establish the effectiveness of the school to work programs and the rationale for preparing these programs
Inclusion criteria. Schools that have school-to-work programs as well as the 12th grade class
Exclusion criteria. Schools that do not have the twelfth grade class or do not have the school-to-work program will not be included in the study.
Design. The study will be a cross-sectional study conducted in ten high schools in ten states. The study will evaluate the effectiveness of school to work programmes in helping students make a transition from school to work or post secondary education. The study will involve students in the 12th grade who ideally should have benefitted most from what they learned in these programs.
Instruments. The study will involve administration of questionnaires for the students and interviews for the teachers. Due to the large number of students it is most appropriate to use the questionnaires because interviews will be time consuming. However, interviews will be used to collect information from the teachers.
The questionnaire will be structured in such a way that it is appropriate for the student audience. In addition the questionnaire will be comprehensive enough to collect the needed information from the student.
The questions constructed will be of simple structure with limited vocabularies which will be appropriate for the study. The sentence meaning will be non ambiguous to ensure that the students responds to questions correctly. The questionnaire will contain thirty questions which will be non-repetitive and geared to acquire intended meaning. The questions will be open ended with choices that capture all probable responses.
The questionnaires will capture the answers to questions related to the following areas.
- Whether the student participated in a school to work program.
- Whether the student was working somewhere while attending the school to work program
- The interviews will be validated by re-interviews
- Whether students can apply what they have learned at work.
- Whether the programme gave students an opportunity to try various careers so that they could make informed career choices.
- Whether there mentor was a role model to them and if he motivated the student in choosing a career path.
- Whether the student can connect class room work with employment requirements.
- Whether the student will consider post secondary education as an option after attaining a high school diploma.
The development of the questionnaires will require the development of thirty questions which will be tested on a likert scale. The likert scale will be able to assess the students’ attitudes towards school to work programmes. The development of the scale is simple and makes it simple to interpret the questions. The scale will have five scoring points these are 1 strongly disagree, 2-disagree, 3-undecided, 4- agree, 5- strongly agree.
After administering the questionnaire a content analysis will be conducted and ambiguous issues could be excluded from analysis. The questions are will also be pretested by administering them to ten respondents and they will be asked if they clearly understood the questions and whether the questions were ambiguous. If some of the questions are found to be ambiguous these will be restructured to ensure that the intended meaning is achieved.