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 research examined how VET students cluster in the Australian VET market and identified eight segments.
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?
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.
Information on the divergence between student numbers and delivery hours for the period 2002 to 2007 is provided in this technical paper. The change in hours from one year to the next is decomposed into three effects, one of which is 'hours inflation', whereby nominal hours increase over time for the same unit of competency or module. Here we show that the 'hours inflation' explains relatively little of the divergence between students and hours. However, another form of hours creep, whereby new modules have higher average hours than ceased modules, was of some significance at the start of the period in question.
This technical paper examines some large and unusual movements for data in the 2007 VET Provider Collection by comparison with 2006. Changes in the patterns of courses undertaken explain most of the divergence between students, enrolments and hours.