A Conceptual Basis for Developing Common Curricula in Teacher Education Programs for Occupational Education. Graduate Studies in Education, Number 2, Volume 3.

Overview & Synopsis

The purpose of this document was to generate a rationale and a design for planning a conceptual basis for developing common curriculums in vocational teacher education training programs. A review of the literature discusses heuristic approaches to teacher education, the rational basis for common programs, empirical studies in teacher education, approaches to determine content and behaviors of common programs, and the direction of research in vocational teacher education. The proposed research model would have the objectives of (1) determining the content of professional education needs for teachers of vocational subjects, (2) determining the competency levels required, and (3) extracting the common core of subject matter for professional education needs and training elements to terminally develop a listing of common needs for vocational teachers. The general design of the proposed approach is patterned after previous studies, but is modified to include (1) a population of vocational teachers representing five disciplines, (2) a factor analysis, and (3) an analysis of the data by the analysis of variance--the test statistic is the F statistic, and the critical region for the test of the hypothesis is the theoretical value for indicated degrees of freedom at the 1 percent level of significance. (MM)