Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

education for a living

In the changing world scnario the term"education for a living" becomes important.Actually its not a nw idea.The great father of India Mahatma Gandhiji fore sighted such an education system.He emphasized the fact that apart from the core education ,a person should unsdergo some sort of skill training in an interested vocation.

vocational education

To survive in the present world of high competition,the most suitable form of education is VOCATIONAL EDUCATION.there are a variety of couse options suitable to the taste and attitude of every individual at any entry level.Course duration may change from a couple of weeks to years.

 

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION & COUNSELLING

 

The impact of technology on occupations, the tendency of employers to set higher educational requirements, and the need for employees with specialized training have made vocational preparation imperative.

 

 

The scope of vocational education is broad, ranging from occupations requiring little skill to those requiring a high degree of skill and scientific knowledge.

 

Although the vocational guidance and vocational education movements developed separately during the early 1900s, they later became closely associated. Today career counseling is recognized as being important for all persons. The basic principle of career counseling and guidance is that a person is better equipped to make occupational plans after determining his or her own characteristics, examining the requirements of various occupations, and matching the two sets of facts with the aid of a skilled counselor.

 

. Various standardized tests and inventories have been developed to measure skills, aptitudes, interests, and other abilities and traits. In addition to school records, job-shadowing techniques, computerized programs, and audiovisuals are also used to assist students with occupational selection.

 

The value of work experience in education has long been recognized and is now emphasized in the counseling of youth

Networking to Land Your Dream Job

In this age of increasingly short-term job cycles, networking is an essential skill for managing your career. Many people think that networking is simply a euphemism for asking for a job—nothing could be further from the truth. If you are truly networking, you are building resources, acquiring information, and offering assistance to others all at the same time.

What is networking?

Networking is the art of building relationships for the purpose of acquiring and disseminating information; it can be done informally and naturally every time you interact with another professional. When you network, your objective is to learn about the other individual and to seek their advice on your project. In the case of job searches, the project is about locating resources—including individuals—that will help you learn about the job market specific to your particular expertise and interests.

 

Vocational guidance counseling may involve aptitude testing to help clarify individual career goals. If a person’s score is similar to scores of others already working in a given occupation, likelihood of success in that field is predicted. Some aptitude tests cover a broad range of skills pertinent to many different occupations. The General Aptitude Test Battery, for example, not only measures general reasoning ability but also includes form perception, clerical perception, motor coordination, and finger and manual dexterity. Other tests may focus on a single area, such as art, engineering, or modern languages.

 

Interest Inventories

 

Self-report questionnaires on which the subject indicates personal preferences among activities are called interest inventories. Because interests may predict satisfaction with some area of employment or education, these inventories are used primarily in guidance counseling. They are not intended to predict success, but only to offer a framework for narrowing career possibilities. For example, one frequently used interest inventory, the Kudor Preference Record, includes ten clusters of occupational interests: outdoors, mechanical, computational, scientific, persuasive, artistic, literary, musical, social service, and clerical. For each item, the subject indicates which of three activities is best or least liked. The total score indicates the occupational clusters that include preferred activities.

 

IV

TYPES OF TESTS

 

A

Achievement Tests

These tests are designed to assess current performance in an academic area. Because achievement is viewed as an indicator of previous learning, it is often used to predict future academic success. An achievement test administered in a public school setting would typically include separate measures of vocabulary, language skills and reading comprehension, arithmetic computation and problem solving, science, and social studies. Individual achievement is determined by comparison of results with average scores derived from large representative national or local samples. Scores may be expressed in terms of “grade-level equivalents”; for example, an advanced third-grade pupil may be reading on a level equivalent to that of the average fourth-grade student.

B

Aptitude Tests

These tests predict future performance in an area in which the individual is not currently trained. Schools, businesses, and government agencies often use aptitude tests when assigning individuals to specific positions. Vocational guidance counseling may involve aptitude testing to help clarify individual career goals. If a person’s score is similar to scores of others already working in a given occupation, likelihood of success in that field is predicted. Some aptitude tests cover a broad range of skills pertinent to many different occupations. The General Aptitude Test Battery, for example, not only measures general reasoning ability but also includes form perception, clerical perception, motor coordination, and finger and manual dexterity. Other tests may focus on a single area, such as art, engineering, or modern languages.

C

Intelligence Tests

In contrast to tests of specific proficiencies or aptitudes, intelligence tests measure the global capacity of an individual to cope with the environment. Test scores are generally known as intelligence quotients, or IQs, although the various tests are constructed quite differently.

D

Interest Inventories

Self-report questionnaires on which the subject indicates personal preferences among activities are called interest inventories. Because interests may predict satisfaction with some area of employment or education, these inventories are used primarily in guidance counseling. They are not intended to predict success, but only to offer a framework for narrowing career possibilities. For example, one frequently used interest inventory, the Kudor Preference Record, includes ten clusters of occupational interests: outdoors, mechanical, computational, scientific, persuasive, artistic, literary, musical, social service, and clerical. For each item, the subject indicates which of three activities is best or least liked. The total score indicates the occupational clusters that include preferred activities.

E

Objective Personality Tests

These tests measure social and emotional adjustment and are used to identify the need for psychological counseling. Items that briefly describe feelings, attitudes, and behaviors are grouped into subscales, each representing a separate personality or style, such as social extroversion or depression. Taken together, the subscales provide a profile of the personality as a whole.

F

Projective Techniques

Some personality tests are based on the phenomenon of projection, a mental process described by Sigmund Freud as the tendency to attribute to others personal feelings or characteristics that are too painful to acknowledge.

V

INTERPRETATION OF RESULTS

The most important aspect of psychological testing involves the interpretation of test results.

A

Scoring

The raw score is the simple numerical count of responses, such as the number of correct answers on an intelligence test. The usefulness of the raw score is limited, however, because it does not convey how well someone does in comparison with others taking the same test. Percentile scores, standard scores, and norms are all devices for making this comparison.

Percentile scoring expresses the rank order of the scores in percentages. The percentile level of a person’s score indicates the proportion of the group that scored above and below that individual. When a score falls at the 50th percentile, for example, half of the group scored higher and half scored lower; a score at the 80th percentile indicates that 20 percent scored higher and 80 percent scored lower than the person being evaluated.

Standard scores are derived from a comparison of the individual raw score with the mean and standard deviation of the group scores. The mean, or arithmetic average, is determined by adding the scores and dividing by the total number of scores obtained. The standard deviation measures the variation of the scores around the mean. Standard scores are obtained by subtracting the mean from the raw score and then dividing by the standard deviation.

Tables of norms are included in test manuals to indicate the expected range of raw scores. Normative data are derived from studies in which the test has been administered to a large, representative group of people. The test manual should include a description of the sample of people used to establish norms, including age, sex, geographical location, and occupation. Norms based on a group of people whose major characteristics are markedly dissimilar from those of the person being tested do not provide a fair standard of comparison.

B

Validity

Interpretation of test scores ultimately involves predictions about a subject’s behavior in a specified situation. If a test is an accurate predictor, it is said to have good validity. Before validity can be demonstrated, a test must first yield consistent, reliable measurements. In addition to reliability, psychologists recognize three main types of validity.

A test has content validity if the sample of items in the test is representative of all the relevant items that might have been used. Words included in a spelling test, for example, should cover a wide range of difficulty.

Criterion-related validity refers to a test’s accuracy in specifying a future or concurrent outcome. For example, an art-aptitude test has predictive validity if high scores are achieved by those who later do well in art school. The concurrent validity of a new intelligence test may be demonstrated if its scores correlate closely with those of an already well-established test.

Construct validity is generally determined by investigating what psychological traits or qualities a test measures; that is, by demonstrating that certain patterns of human behavior account to some degree for performance on the test. A test measuring the trait “need for achievement,” for instance, might be shown to predict that high scorers work more independently, persist longer on problem-solving tasks, and do better in competitive situations than low scorers.