Using SMS Technology to Survey Low‐Income Youth: Lessons from a Vocational Education Tracking Study in Kenya

Abstract

Tracking graduates of job training programs is increasingly important, given high youth unemployment and the need to understand labour market outcomes to inform policy and program decisions. We describe the strengths and weaknesses of using text messaging to survey 2180 graduates of Vocational Training Centres in three Kenyan counties. The response rate was 18 percent. The short message service survey over-represented urban graduates and those from private Vocational Training Centres, and 39 percent were answered by someone other than the intended respondentseriously jeopardizing data quality. We report lessons learned and offer recommendations for designing graduate tracking surveys.

Research on the Evaluation of Higher Vocational Students’ Occupational Literacy in the Context of Big Data

“…The existing evaluation system focuses on vocational skills training but neglects vocational literacy enhancement, and the existing vocational literacy evaluation can not timely and comprehensively reflect the various performances of students in school and fails to truly reflect the comprehensive quality of students [6]. Through intelligent technology to collect all kinds of data on students' learning activities and life performance inside and outside the classroom, we can effectively obtain information with timeliness and screen, analyze, manage, and utilize it to achieve the purpose of solving problems and improving abilities, which is more helpful for schools, teachers, families, and the society to grasp the students' dynamics in a timely manner, to understand the characteristics of the students more effectively, and to achieve the purpose of improving students' vocational literacy [7][8].…”