New Vocational School Students’ Basic ICT Skills Self-Assessment

Abstract

This article addresses 824 Finnish vocational upper secondary level students' self-assessments related to their basic ICT skills and their views regarding the importance of ICT skills for their future career. A questionnaire was distributed to students representing seven vocational fields who were starting their studies leading to a vocational upper secondary qualification. The results show that in many claims students in the field of Information and Communication Technologies assess their skills as significantly higher than other students, while students focusing on Health and Welfare rated their personal skills as significantly lower. The results also show that students in the field of Information and Communication Technologies and Humanities and Arts clearly believe that they will need IT skills in their future careers. Compared to others, students in Technology and Service Industries were significantly less likely to think so. This study contributes to research concerning vocational students' ICT competence and will help in developing online courses requiring knowledge of the differences in the need for guidance experienced by students from different vocational fields.

Vocational school students’ use and opinions of voluntary-based online learning solutions presented in a mathematics course

“…We are especially interested in finding out possible underlying reasons for these significantly positive attitudes: Could it be explained by students' freedom to choose, well-designed and functional online learning environment, or their maturity, as a majority of the students were adults who have learned the importance of mathematics for their lives? Previously, it was found that although the experience of needing support for example from a teacher, a classmate or parents when studying mathematics was not remarkably common in any of the vocational fields, Health and Welfare students felt that they needed significantly more support in studying mathematics than did students in many other fields (Suominen et al, 2022). Gender may be one reason for the perceived need for support, since in our previous study 79.9% of Health and Welfare students were women (Suominen et al, 2022).…”

“…Three out of five students who answered the questionnaire about the educational video had actually watched the video. In our prior study about vocational students' expectations of online learning (Suominen et al, 2022), verbal instructions, pictures and videos were the most favored ways to receiving online learning instructions. Video guides were especially preferred among the Humanities and Arts students.…”

“…Previously, it was found that although the experience of needing support for example from a teacher, a classmate or parents when studying mathematics was not remarkably common in any of the vocational fields, Health and Welfare students felt that they needed significantly more support in studying mathematics than did students in many other fields (Suominen et al, 2022). Gender may be one reason for the perceived need for support, since in our previous study 79.9% of Health and Welfare students were women (Suominen et al, 2022). In a Finnish national assessment of learning outcomes in 9th grade mathematics, girls considered their skills in mathematics to be significantly weaker than that of boys even though there were no gender differences in their actual competence (Metsämuuronen & Nousiainen, 2021).…”

“…The teacher-assessed assignments, which consisted of essays, were even more applied than autograded assignments. The course included visual instructions related to certain basic IT skills, such as sharing a OneDrive file that had been devised, for example, on the basis of the results of our previous study (Suominen et al, 2021). Student feedback focused on three entities: repetition opportunity, the educational video, and additional training opportunity, which in turn are the focus of the present article.…”

“…Since the development of an online course should start with getting to know the target group (e.g., Baldwin & Ching, 2019), the views of students starting vocational education concerning their own basic information and communication technologies (ICT) skills (Suominen et al, 2021) and online learning and studying mathematics (Suominen et al, 2022) had been investigated previously. This article focuses primarily on discovering how students from different vocational fields used and evaluated some of the activities contained in the pilot version of the mathematics online course, especially the opportunity for repetition, the educational video, and the possibility of additional practice.…”