{"title":"Reimagining post-COVID distance education support services with achievement motives and career personality","authors":"","doi":"10.1007/s11159-023-10038-6","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>For a successful transition from distance learning to first careers, adolescents’ psychosocial and career decision-making will require analytics-driven support services. However, current distance-education support services in Ghana have yet to adopt psychometric techniques for effective career guidance and innovative pedagogy in the post-COVID period. Hence, the study presented here explored distance-education students’ career typologies and their need for achievement motives, using a cross-sectional survey design. John Holland’s Self-Directed Search (SDS) inventory, with high reliability coefficients, was administered to 523 first-year distance learners. Data were analysed using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), <em>t</em>-test, and binary logistic regression with relevant assumptions explored. The results indicate a significant relationship between open and distance learning (ODL) students’ need for achievement motivation and career personality typologies. Enterprising, Social, and Conventional (ESC) personality typology also emerged as the dominant three-letter career code for students. While gender was not found to be important for categorising career personality styles, significant differences were observed between age and students’ job experience. The study concludes that students’ achievement motives have a strong impact on their career personality scores, with ESC codes confirming digitally engineered post-COVID job environments that are demanding innovation, critical thinking, humanity and ethical competencies for students. Given that many adolescents are enrolling in ODL programmes, recommendations are offered for curriculum development, guidance and counselling interventions and distance-education administration to adopt psychometrics analysis for psychosocial and career personality-targeted education support services.</p>","PeriodicalId":47056,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF EDUCATION","volume":"112 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF EDUCATION","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-023-10038-6","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
For a successful transition from distance learning to first careers, adolescents’ psychosocial and career decision-making will require analytics-driven support services. However, current distance-education support services in Ghana have yet to adopt psychometric techniques for effective career guidance and innovative pedagogy in the post-COVID period. Hence, the study presented here explored distance-education students’ career typologies and their need for achievement motives, using a cross-sectional survey design. John Holland’s Self-Directed Search (SDS) inventory, with high reliability coefficients, was administered to 523 first-year distance learners. Data were analysed using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), t-test, and binary logistic regression with relevant assumptions explored. The results indicate a significant relationship between open and distance learning (ODL) students’ need for achievement motivation and career personality typologies. Enterprising, Social, and Conventional (ESC) personality typology also emerged as the dominant three-letter career code for students. While gender was not found to be important for categorising career personality styles, significant differences were observed between age and students’ job experience. The study concludes that students’ achievement motives have a strong impact on their career personality scores, with ESC codes confirming digitally engineered post-COVID job environments that are demanding innovation, critical thinking, humanity and ethical competencies for students. Given that many adolescents are enrolling in ODL programmes, recommendations are offered for curriculum development, guidance and counselling interventions and distance-education administration to adopt psychometrics analysis for psychosocial and career personality-targeted education support services.
期刊介绍:
The International Review of Education – Journal of Lifelong Learning (IRE) is edited by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, a global centre of excellence for lifelong learning and learning societies. Founded in 1955, IRE is the world’s longest-running peer-reviewed journal of comparative education, serving not only academic and research communities but, equally, high-level policy and practice readerships throughout the world. Today, IRE provides a forum for theoretically-informed and policy-relevant applied research in lifelong and life-wide learning in international and comparative contexts. Preferred topic areas include adult education, non-formal education, adult literacy, open and distance learning, vocational education and workplace learning, new access routes to formal education, lifelong learning policies, and various applications of the lifelong learning paradigm.Consistent with the mandate of UNESCO, the IRE fosters scholarly exchange on lifelong learning from all regions of the world, particularly developing and transition countries. In addition to inviting submissions from authors for its general issues, the IRE also publishes regular guest-edited special issues on key and emerging topics in lifelong learning.