Internationally, the delivery of vocational education and training is being challenged by increasing skills shortages in certain industries and/or rapidly changing skill requirements. To respond to this challenge, rigid and centralised state bureaucracies are increasingly adopting partnerships between schools and industry as a strategy to…

The term "partnership" is increasingly used by governments, industry, community organisations and schools in supporting their daily businesses. Similar to the terms "ICT" and "learning," "partnerships" are now ubiquitous in policy discourse. Yet, the term remains ill-defined and ambiguous. This study reviews…

The Nigeria's oil industry has been criticized for some time now for its inability to render adequate services to the general public. This criticism is predicated on the fact that the standards of productivity in their services are low and that their facilities (i.e. the refineries) are not working up to capacity. This is evident in their…

The key drivers of technical and further education (TAFE) institutes' systems for monitoring and evaluating effectiveness and efficiency are accountability for government funding, compliance with legislation and quality assurance requirements. The need to supplement government funding with commercial income requires institutes to understand the…

Focuses upon developmental perspectives and problems in improving program effectiveness, cost efficiency, and management performance for vocational education. Means for analyzing and improving the cost-effectiveness of vocational programs are discussed. (Author/RAO)

One of a series of papers on critical issues in vocational-technical education, this paper identifies and explores four issues in evaluation of vocational education: (1) Time and Performance, (2) Evaluation of Outputs and/or Outcomes, (3) Evaluation of Efficiency and Effectiveness, and (4) Policy Evaluation. (HD)

This paper describes a management system for secondary vocational education programs that is based on a cost-effectiveness analysis model. The model described was developed specifically for use in planning and evaluating secondary school vocational programs, although it might be applied to other educational programs as well. The model generates…

Addresses the question of how to determine the overall effect of the vocational education and training system on efficiency and equity. Suggests criteria to guide allocation of public resources for education and training to meet efficiency and equity goals. (Author/JOW)

The Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model, a conceptual model for measuring productivity and efficiency, is presented and applied in this report. First, the DEA model is described, and three of its properties that make it particularly useful are identified; i.e., it measures efficiency of units relative to each other rather than to absolute…

A study evaluated the efficiency of job-specific training in military technical areas other than electronics. It sought to determine whether individualized, computer-managed instruction (CMI) can be used to avoid some of the administrative difficulties common to more conventional forms of job-specific training, and it sought to determine the…

This case analysis describes a program to improve the efficiency with which students in the Adult and Vocational Education Ph.D. program at the University of Connecticut work towards and achieve the doctoral degree. Data gathered between 1985 to 1992 indicated students (who were mostly part-time) dropped out at a 50 percent rate and took 7 to 10…

Data envelopment analysis, which is designed to assist in identifying best practice performance in the use of resources among a group of like organizations, was used to estimate the technical and scale efficiency of vocational education and training in 25 New Zealand polytechnics serving a total of 94,201 students. The polytechnics' efficiency was…

Information was gathered about how Technical and Further Education (TAFE) agencies throughout Australia were implementing and using performance indicators. The context of TAFE's perceived mission and corporate goals were considered. A history of the development of national performance indicators in TAFE was compiled. The project drew heavily on…

Two major areas of concern to vocational education are cost benefit and job and task analysis. In recent years vocational education has broadened its outlook in terms of general human development, but the historical context of vocational education and concerns for accountability require evaluation of vocational education programs to consider cost…

Recent Australian research provides a solid body of evidence that training investments can yield very high levels of returns for firms across a range of sectors. It highlights these important factors about returns on investment (ROI): ROI come in many forms; immediate ROI are highest when training is highly focused; measuring ROI is not always…