How effective are our teaching methods for vocational education

Abstract

In vocational education, students' attitudes are often overlooked in its pedagogy deployment. The theme of this paper is to investigate how to measure the effectiveness of teaching in student's affective domain. The research experiment was designed with time-span of 15 weeks. A set of questionnaires was designed as the instrument of the investigation. Prior to the experiment, students were split into two groups. Subsequently, these two groups of students went through different approaches of teaching. At the end of the experiment, the same questionnaires were used to probe students' attitude. Data analysis was used to measure the shift of attitude before and after the experiment of these two groups of students. Apparently, one group of students has more positive attitude. However, data analysis shows we cannot conclude it was caused solely by imposing one particular teaching method. Likewise, even with the fact that many students of the experimental group favored one particular type of teaching method, there is no evidence that this teaching method can have higher impact in students' attitude. This study provides a useful viewpoint in the planning and evaluation when conducting a novel teaching methodology.