Assessing Educational Pathways for Manufacturing in Rural Communities: An Investigation of New and Existing Programs in Northwest Florida

评估农村社区制造业的教育途径：对佛罗里达州西北部新项目和现有项目的调查

基本信息

批准号：
1700581
负责人：
Marcia Mardis
金额：
$ 79.25万
依托单位：
Florida State University
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2017
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2017-09-01 至 2023-08-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1700581&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Assessing Educational Pathways Manufacturing Rural

项目摘要

With the call for building the nation's skilled technical workforce, the demand for middle skill professionals in technical fields in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is increasing. The alignment of educational programming and job requirements for STEM-oriented technician sectors is essential for establishing career pathways that produce high quality middle skills professionals for technology-rich fields. Building on prior research on career pathways in Information Technologies (IT) this targeted research project investigates the alignment of educational programming, employer needs, and new employee experience in Advanced Manufacturing (AM) and tests the usefulness of tools and processes developed to assess such alignment. Focusing on the opportunities and challenges in rural areas, the overarching goal of the project is to improve rural manufacturing capacity by better understanding the relationships among curriculum, employer expectations, and student readiness for jobs in AM.The quantitative and qualitative mixed methods research design combines content analysis and text mining with surveys, and interviews/focus groups. A review of the literature frames the study by integrating the literature on advanced manufacturing education, employment qualifications for technology-rich technician fields, and readiness to engage in entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship as employee or innovator/small business owner. The research design, instrument development, and data analyses will be guided by a theoretical approach that blends theories of human, social, and cultural capital. The research team will apply text mining approaches for text preprocessing and keyword extraction to identify learning outcomes specified in syllabi; tokenize the text; extract and identify keywords; and match national, state, and professional standards and requirements for industry certificates/certifications with course syllabi and job postings. Qualitative analysis of interviews and focus groups will examine the expectations of employers and employees through an iterative process for clustering data into themes until saturation and themes have stabilized. The extent of matching among data from different sources will be calculated and examined for congruence and divergence of educational programming and job requirements. The testing of tools/instruments and processes for conducting analyses of educational programing with job requirements in advanced manufacturing will confirm the viability of an approach for analyzing career pathways in other STEM-oriented technician programs.

随着建设国家技能型人才队伍的号召，对科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）技术领域中级技能人才的需求日益增加。以 STEM 为导向的技术人员部门的教育规划和工作要求的协调对于建立为技术丰富的领域培养高素质中等技能专业人员的职业道路至关重要。该针对性研究项目以之前对信息技术 (IT) 职业道路的研究为基础，调查先进制造 (AM) 领域教育规划、雇主需求和新员工体验的一致性，并测试为评估这种一致性而开发的工具和流程的实用性。该项目着眼于农村地区的机遇和挑战，其总体目标是通过更好地理解课程、雇主期望和学生对增材制造工作准备之间的关系来提高农村制造能力。定量和定性混合方法研究设计结合了通过调查、访谈/焦点小组进行内容分析和文本挖掘。对文献的回顾通过整合有关先进制造教育、技术丰富的技术领域的就业资格以及作为雇员或创新者/小企业主参与创业和内部创业的准备情况的文献来框架研究。研究设计、仪器开发和数据分析将以融合人力、社会和文化资本理论的理论方法为指导。研究团队将应用文本挖掘方法进行文本预处理和关键词提取，以识别教学大纲中指定的学习成果；标记文本；提取并识别关键词；并将行业证书/认证的国家、州和专业标准和要求与课程大纲和职位发布相匹配。访谈和焦点小组的定性分析将通过将数据聚类为主题的迭代过程来检查雇主和雇员的期望，直到饱和和主题稳定下来。将计算和检查不同来源数据之间的匹配程度，以了解教育规划和工作要求的一致性和差异性。对用于对先进制造中的工作要求进行教育规划分析的工具/仪器和流程进行测试，将证实在其他面向 STEM 的技术人员计划中分析职业路径的方法的可行性。