A Study of the Influence of Career Counseling Perception on the Employment Competencies of Design Students in Central Taiwan

In recent years, many advanced countries have been outsourcing their lower-skilled jobs to other countries for manufacturing. As a result, employment opportunity has been declining for younger generations in advanced countries. Moreover, the extensive application of production technologies also leads to the replacement of labors by automatic machines. The employment opportunity of young adults has also gradually been deprived. It has become more difficult for students to make a career decision during college. After graduation, students also encounter the difficult choice of getting a job or going to graduate school. Therefore, career counseling for a student is critical to his/her career development. It is required to assist students in developing a correct career concept so that they can make an appropriate choice for their career. College students who are studying in design-related departments in central Taiwan were selected as the research target in this study. A total of 460 questionnaire copies were dispatched and 378 valid questionnaire copies were returned with a rate of response of 82%. The result of this research is threefold, as follows. 1. Career counseling has a significant positive influence on the vocational self-concept. 2. Vocational self-concept has a significantly positive influence on the employment competencies. 3. Career counseling has a significantly positive influence on employment competencies. We proposed recommendations based on the results of the investigation and analysis. It is expected that, the result can help schools provide appropriate and proper career counseling in order to assist and guide students into making proper career choices.

Orientation and Mobility Career, College, and Community Readiness Standards: A Delphi Study

Introduction: Performance standards drive current instructional practice. Disability-specific curricula is a critical component in preparing children for postsecondary transition. Currently, no standards govern instruction in orientation and mobility (O&M) skills for children with visual impairments. Standards for O&M would provide structure for educational equity in assuring that students with visual impairments receive a free and appropriate education. Method: This study used Delphi survey methods to determine consensus on the validity of the Orientation and Mobility Career, College, and Community Readiness Standards (O&M CCCRS). Consensus was measured as 80% or better agreement. Three survey rounds were initiated and two were completed by a purposive sample of certified orientation and mobility specialist (COMS) from two participant groups: Seven COMS from primary and secondary school–based settings and three from personnel preparation. Results: This Delphi study achieved consensus on the O&M CCCRS five student-performance standards (end of Grade 12 or age 21 years) as well as the corresponding age- and grade–level performance indicators at ages 24 months, 4 years, end of Grade 3, end of Grade 7, and end of Grade 12. Consensus was reached on all but two performance indicators (83 of the 85). Discussion: The Round 1 survey established validity of five O&M Domains: (1) Concept Development, (2) Sensory Development, (3) Orientation and Mapping, (4) Travel Techniques, and (5) Communication, Personal Safety, and Advocacy. Subsequent survey rounds found that 80% of participants agreed on the inclusion of 83 of the 85 performance indicators corresponding to those domains. Implications for practitioners: Alignment of O&M standards to Common Core Standards empowers teams to justify the instructional time, to document skill acquisition relative to the benchmarks of general-education peers, and to show where O&M skills support progress in common core and state learning standards.

Career and College Readiness: A Summary of Two Sessions at the AFB Leadership Conference on Orientation and Mobility and Transition Services for Students with Visual Impairments

Editor’s Note: This commentary is based on the conference sessions, “Orientation and Mobility Career, College and Community Readiness Standards,” by Kathryn Botsford and Mary Tellefson, and “Engaging Students, Families and Teams for Success After High School,” by Sheila Koenig, which took place on Thursday, February 28, 2019, and Friday, March 1, 2019, respectively, at the American Foundation for the Blind Leadership Conference in Arlington, VA.

Finding Relationship among Various Students’ Attributes with Sport-Interest using Association Rule Mining Method

Data mining methods are widely used in educational domain for the purpose of finding useful information from the large student’s database. This information is then used to understand the behaviors of students in respect of their academic and other curricular performance. One of such Data mining methods called Association rule mining is used in this research study to analyze the student’s database of Career College Bhopal using two mining tools called Weka and XLMiner. The database contain records of 212 students with main attributes like Student’s Gender, Category, Subject, name of district where he/she belong and their parent’s/guardian’s occupation/profession and sport-interest. Sport department of any educational institute also need to understand the behavior and psychology of students for their sport interest to make sport-policy for their institute. In this paper, author has found some unknown relationship among these attributes with respect to sport-interest which is a target attribute. This experimental study has generated many association rules that can be used to answer the questions like which student from particular course, district and category will participate in sports? Which sport usually prefer by male and female student most? Which student can be performed better in which sport? In this way sport policy maker can use these mined information about the sport interest of students to make better decisions in sport framework in an educational institute.

An Empirical Study on Factors Influencing Business Students’ Choice of Specialization with Reference to Nizwa College of Technology, Oman

The academic specialization chosen by students is of crucial importance for their future career and therefore they should have access to appropriate information and guidance that would help facilitate a more optimal decision. This study aims to identify the variables that influence business students to choose their specialization. A sample of 163 business students from Nizwa College of Technology, Sultanate of Oman, is selected for the study. Factor analysis and multiple regression analysis are used for analysis. The most important variable that influences the students’ choice of specialization is the variable ‘Liking and preference of specialization’ (X2) with the highest mean. The factor analysis analysis output reveals the five sub-scales that influence students’ choice of specialization; Preference and dissonance post choice, Self and Peer influence, Nature of marketing specialization, Gender and specialization choice, Convenience and career. College orientation on specialisation (X5) is a significant factor that influences the students to advice their juniors to make the first choice of specialisation viz. HRM (63%), Accounting (32%) and Marketing (5%).