International Journal of Vocational Education Studies

Vocational Education and Training Systems Between School and Company

Dietmar Frommberger — 2025-03-27

Longitudinal Analysis of School-Workplace Cooperation in Vocational Training

Beifang Ma — 2025-03-27

School-workplace cooperation is a unique research field within the dual training system,
where trainees’ subjective experience of this cooperation is crucial for investigating training quality.
In this study, we tracked 458 industrial administrative assistant trainees throughout their entire
training period and modeled changes in their experience of one organizational and two pedagogical
dimensions of school-workplace cooperation over time and across individual trainees. Using a Latent
Growth Model (LGM), we included both time-invariant and time-varying predictors to explain
the growth dynamics of these dimensions of trainees’ experience of school-workplace cooperation.
The results show that all three dimensions have unique growth dynamics over time and across individual
trainees. The way predictors influence their growth also differs significantly from each other.
Among the dimensions, the practical relevance of school learning shows a decline and is the most
sensitive to predictors. The integration of specialized knowledge has seen an increase but can rarely
be explained by factors included in this study. The transparency and organization of training dimension
has remained relatively stable.

Between Selection and Inclusion in Vocational Education and Training

Fernando Marhuenda Fluixá — 2025-03-27

This article discusses inclusivness of Vocational Education and Training (VET) at Upper
Secondary Education (USE). While inclusion has become a policy aim in compulsory education, it is
not so clear that it is the case beyond post-16 education. In the case of VET, the demand of high quality
standardized vocational qualifications challenges inclusion. The article addresses three different
dimensions of inclusion: access to VET at USE, successfully achieving a qualification, and entering
the labor market in a position according to the qualification achieved. We approach inclusion from
a policy rather than a pedagogical perspective in section 2, and in section 3 our hypothesis about the
inclusiveness of a school-based VET and a dual VET system are presented. In section 4 we choose
Spain and Switzerland as examples of these systems, we show indicators, and we describe how both
systems deal with the three dimensions of accessing, achieving a qualification and entering the labor
market. The analysis concludes by stating that inclusion is particularly difficult because of the first
dimension: it is in transition to VET in USE where both countries have more difficulties and could
improve their inclusiveness. The problem is the same, but the reasons are different and these are explained
in the text, addressing tensions between reputation and inclusiveness and the externalization
of measures. Some considerations on comparative education also result from our analysis.

Supporting Peer Feedback Formulation in a Video-Based Digital Platform in Technical Vocational Education

Sietse Brands — 2025-03-27

Vocational education and training (VET) students often have difficulties with formulating
peer feedback for various reasons. This is a problem as only well-argued peer feedback positively
affects learning. Thus, supporting peer feedback formulation is desirable. This study explores the effectiveness
of a prompt consisting of evaluative markers and sentence openers on the quality of peer
feedback formulation. 48 VET students in a technical domain in the Netherlands watched the same
five videos on practice and then provided peer feedback to the performers. An experimental group
(24 students) had access to evaluative markers and sentence openers to support feedback formulation.
The control group (24 students) did not have access to these supports. The generated feedback
was analysed on feedback quality indicators and compared using independent sample t-tests. The
results indicated that prompt-based supports can improve the quality of student-formulated peer
feedback. We discuss the importance of carefully designed prompts and how they can contribute to
better peer feedback formulation.

Deissinger, Thomas & Melnyk, Oksana (Eds.) (2024). Partnership-Based Governance and Standardization of Vocational Teacher Education in Ukraine.

Fernando Marhuenda Fluixá — 2025-03-27