On-the-Job learning

Abstract

I n the 1980s, youth unemployment and discontent with schooling persist as problems facing educators. Numerous programs and recommendations to create school-based, work-experience programs have attempted to address these problems. The report of the Panel on Youth of the President's Science Advisory Committee advocated a closer union of school and community by creating more opportunities for youth to participate in the life of the community. The report of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education cited a number of reform proposals calling for less schooling and more work experiences for youth. The Youth Employment Demonstration Projects Act of 1977 encouraged local education agencies to place school-age, low-income youth in jobs. These programs hoped to impact upon the future employability of youth, to make schooling more relevant and interesting to them, and thereby to ease the transition from school to work. While adult employment status is the decisive measurement of program success, such a long-term outcome is expensive to document and difficult to assess. Other indicators of program effectiveness are needed for immediate evaluations of current and proposed programs to provide federal, state, and local policy makers with guidelines for decision making. Analytic principles from the curriculum field can serve as one source for indicators of current program effectiveness. These principles of curricular form and content embody both empirical and theoretical knowledge of human learning. Although they have usually been applied to classroom instructional programs, they can provide criteria for evaluating the quality of work experience programs. In order to analyze such programs for policy purposes, one needs to assess the quality of the day-to-day activities that youth encounter, because it is the cumulative effect of these activities over time that offers hope of easing unemployment and reducing inequality. Program planners and proposal reviewers could make use of these principles to evaluate the probable effectiveness of programs in the planning stages. As programs are implemented, these principles can help local program personnel make further choices when faced with reality constraints. A work-experience curriculum is a set of learning activities centered around the work experience. Part of the task of this study is to generate activity categories that describe what youth do in the programs. This definition stresses that the activities should have some relationship to learning. In The Boundless Resource, W. Wirtz emphasized that the learning should have an application beyond particular job tasks, to life in general: