This technical paper provides details underpinning the new and previous methodologies for calculating completion and attrition rates at three different hierarchical levels: Individuals, apprenticeships, and contracts.
This document provides technical detail and supporting data for the research findings discussed in ‘The student journey in VET: the many faces of completion and non-completion’.
This technical paper summarises exploratory analysis undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of using machine learning approaches to calculate projected completion rates for VET programs and compares with the current Markov chains methodology used by NCVER.
This technical report provides an evaluation of three alternative methodological approaches for calculating completion rate projections for apprentices and trainees.
This paper outlines how the methodology used to determine government-funded VET program completion rates can now also be used for total VET activity program completion rates.
This technical paper reports on the 2018 self-reported graduate model review. This statistical model is used to predict whether Student Outcomes Survey participants who self-report as graduates are ‘actual’ graduates according to official definitions.
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?
This report investigates the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) for its coverage of wellbeing questions. It is an area of considerable interest to policy-makers, and having a valid set of wellbeing questions in LSAY will enhance the capacity to investigate the links between wellbeing and other domains of interest for young people. The analysis finds three robust factors, which can be termed social wellbeing, material wellbeing and career. The three factors do not cover all the dimensions of wellbeing discussed in the literature, particularly the psychological aspects. Suggestions are made for enhancing the current list of wellbeing questions in LSAY.
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.
This paper argues that assessment can play a central role in teaching and learning, and selecting an appropriate mix of assessment strategies can satisfy multiple goals of key stakeholders in vocational education and training. These goals include promoting learning, certifying learning and program evaluation. These objectives must be understood in a broad context delineated by the structures of education systems and of labour markets which, in turn, reside within national policy objectives. Forms of assessment must be consistent with the goals of learning and with a broad range of valued learning outcomes.
This paper was prepared for the Australian Government's National Resources Sector Employment Taskforce, which was created to investigate the extent to which skill shortages might impact on the development of the resources sector. It applies historical apprenticeship commencement rates to population projections to provide an estimate of the number of tradespeople likely to be working in the resources sector between 2010 20 at a detailed level and by region.