Career Planning Support for Students Using Neuroscience-Based Assessment with Machine Learning Evaluation

Abstract

Hong Kong students nowadays face many pressures, especially in their academic studies, but their inner talents have been disregarded. Hong Kong is short of career guidance services and life planning education. This chapter presents a system – Career Profile – for providing career planning support for students. The system aims to provide a lifetime profile for every student in Hong Kong to determine their intellectual abilities and holistic thinking patterns and advise them on their appropriate career paths. Parents and teachers can also get clear information about their children/students through the Career Profile and so can enhance their communication and relationships with them. There are four main parts in the Career Profile. The first part is on assessment, which adopts Holistic Thinking Pattern Assessment as the neuroscience-based tool to collect data from students and their parents. The second part makes use of machine learning algorithms to identify the thinking pattern of individual students from the data collected. The third part advises students and parents on appropriate career choices. The last part is about the management system used by schools and teachers to centrally manage all the students’ profiles with certain useful functions. The design of the system was tested by three groups – students, parents and teachers. The results indicated the importance of implementing the Career Profile and the advantages of using machine learning evaluation.