This exploratory piece of work aims to illustrate the potential of matching methods in vocational education and training (VET) research.
Do pre-apprenticeships help individuals to obtain an apprenticeship?
The Student Outcomes Survey is an annual national survey of vocational education and training (VET) students. Since 1995, participants have been asked to rate their satisfaction with different aspects of their training, grouped under three main themes: teaching, assessment, and general skills and learning experiences. In this paper we review and compare three different methods of creating summary measures — Rasch analysis, weighted means and simple means — that encapsulate the three main themes of student satisfaction. We find that all three methods yield similar results and so recommend using the simple means method to create the summary measures.