This study aims to develop career education program as a means of increasing career awareness for elementary school students in the phase of career development toward the phase of career awareness, raise career awareness through experience of various ...
This study aims to develop career education program as a means of increasing career awareness for elementary school students in the phase of career development toward the phase of career awareness, raise career awareness through experience of various career-related activities, and implement this program in the onsite school environment.
This program complies with Posner's model of a course design (Posner & Rudnitsky, 1980), and forms reasoning for the program procedures based on the survey of requirements from students, parents, and teachers in terms of improvement of current elementary school career education. This program analyzes ILOs(Intended Learning Objectives), and organizes course curriculum into the following sections: self-understanding, understanding of jobs and work-world, positive job attitude and self job-value criteria, and sensible career decision-making.
This program offers 3 ~ 5 class hours per one section, and these activities include occupation board game, discussion, brainstorming, TV and video watching, business card making, autography writing, and so on. They are devised to present effective teaching method for career awareness, and to require to follow learning steps of problem identification, problem analysis, problem solving, and feedback in order. In addition, this program provides career decision-making information for parents who influence future career of their children, so that it will give them right guide to career advice for their own children.
The developed program was carried out with 35 students of 4th grade in S elementary school, Dongjak-gu in Seoul for 17 class-hours. In order to improve the program and its feasibility, examination of career awareness is performed before and after onsite program test. SPSS/WIN is employed to produce t-verification analysis of the examination results. Additionally, teachers use checklists to observe interest and participation of students, and self-examination method by children is used for children to review by themselves education program satisfaction and their behavior. After the completion of the program, questionnaires are given participant students and their parents to study the reaction of students and their parents to this program and the career education materials.
The result of this onsite program test demonstrates that career awareness of testee population makes a statistically meaningful difference(p<.05) before and after the test in terms of self-understanding, understanding of jobs and work-world, sensible career decision-making except positive job attitude and self job-value criteria. The result from the analysis of observation by teachers, self-examination by children, testimonials, and program survey also supports the fact that this education program brings about positive change in career awareness of children, and that it provides them with attitude to have wish of and to prepare for their jobs and future.
The survey of program materials for parents with some modification in this study shows that many parents answer in the affirmative about program materials, and they want to use program materials for teaching and advice.
To sum up, the career education program in this study proves its worth by producing overall positive effects on career awareness for elementary students, and suggests that career education materials to help parents give the right guide and advice to their children are useful for many parents. But following researches are also needed to improve the strategies and refine the program that can make up for ineffective parts of this study.