The purpose of this study was to investigate the determinants of vocational high school dropout and help prepare the educational alternatives for preventing dropout in each school. The vocational high school is higher as compared with the middle schoo...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the determinants of vocational high school dropout and help prepare the educational alternatives for preventing dropout in each school. The vocational high school is higher as compared with the middle school and the academic high school at dropout rate. School dropouts have an influence on entire society as well as themselves. The countermeasures against school dropout have to be taken at a national level and the distinctiveness of each school need to be considered at a unit school level.
The major research problems of this study were as follows :
First, What are the factors of a W vocational high school dropout?
Second, What are the educational alternatives to the W vocational high school dropout?
To investigate the above-mentioned questions, a vocational high school with a high dropout rate was selected to administer a survey and the homeroom teachers' written opinions were analyzed. The survey were composed of the basic contents(school, school year, department, gender, economic level), 8 dropout factors(revenge behavior, peer alignment, inappropriate relationship with opposite sex, inappropriate relationship with friends, broken home, improper home environment, absence/remaining in the same class, negative attitude toward the teachers) developed by Bae, Young-Tae(2003) to predict school dropouts, and school satisfaction questions. The subjects of the study were 675 students from the W vocational high school. The homeroom teachers' 129 written opinions from 2002 to 2004 were collected, analyzed finding the word or phrase that could be classified as factors of school dropout, and compared with a result of the survey analysis.
As a result of the content analysis of the survey and the teachers' written opinions, the factors of the W vocational high school dropout were found out to be absence, broken home, school year, inappropriate relationship with opposite sex, inappropriate relationship with friends, negative attitude toward the teachers, and a factor mainly emerged in the teachers' written opinions was school dissatisfaction.
These factors could be divided into educationally unalterable factors(absence, broken home, school year) and alterable factors (inappropriate relationship with opposite sex and friends, negative attitude toward the teachers, school dissatisfaction). Therefore, the W vocational high school need to run a educational program aimed at the build-up of proper human relationships(relation with opposite sex, friends relation, teacher-student relation) for absentees, students from a broken home, and students in the lower grades. Also, an effort need to be made to settle the factors of school dissatisfaction(educational facilities and school guidance).