MATH first page

The SCANS

U.S. Department of Labor, The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills SCANS). (1991). What Work Requires of Schools. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

U.S. Department of Labor, The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS). (1992). Learning a Living: A Blueprint for High Performance. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Two significant works have been published in the 1990s relating education to the workplace. The reports of the SCANS Commission ("What Work Requires of Schools" and"Learning a Living") clearly indicate that the worker of the future will need to have certain personal qualities and interpersonal skills in order to effectively apply the knowledge gained through schooling.

Wonacott,-Michael-E. Career Education and Applied Academics. ERIC Digest No. 128. ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career, and Vocational Education, Columbus, Ohio. Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), Washington, DC. EDO-CE-92-128; 1992 4 p.

In many respects, career education has never been needed more than it is today. The ever-faster pace of technological change and the increased competitiveness of workplaces and economies around the globe have challenged the nation's ability to maintain the world's highest standard of living. According to the Secretary's Commissionon Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS 1991), a strong back,eager hands, and a high school diploma used to be enough to get a job, keep it, and make it into a career. No more--now the need to keep abreast of technological change and to participate effectively in today's high-performance workplace require each worker to possess a set of basic competencies and a foundation of skills and personal qualities (ibid., p. vii):

Basic competency areas:

• Resources--allocating time, money, materials, space, and staff
• Interpersonal skills--working on teams, teaching others, serving customers, leading, negotiating, and working well with people from culturally diverse backgrounds
• Information--acquiring and evaluating data, organizing and maintaining files, interpreting and communicating, and using computers to process information
• Systems--understanding social, organizational, and technological systems; monitoring and correcting performance; and designing or improving systems
• Technology--selecting equipment and tools, applying technology to specific tasks, and maintaining and troubleshooting technologies

Foundation skills and qualities:

• Basic skills--reading, writing, speaking, and listening, arthmetic and mathematics
• Thinking skills--thinking creatively, making decisions, solving problems, knowing how to learn, and reasoning
• Personal qualities--responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, and integrity

A further SCANS report (1992) spells out the implications for educators who wish to provide their students with such competencies and foundation skills: (1)teaching should be offered in context--"learning to know" should not be separated from "learning to do"; (2) improving the match between what work requires and what students are taught requires changing how instruction is delivered and how students learn; (3) high performance requires a new system of school administration and assessment; and (4) the entire community must be involved. Explicitly or implicitly, the SCANS competencies, foundation, and implications encompass two key tenets of career education:

• Infusion--Prerequisite knowledge and skills needed in the world of work should not be taught in isolation; rather, they should be infused throughout the curriculum. Career information, career decision-making skills, academic basic skills, technological skills, information skills, and interpersonal skills should pervade all of education.
• Careers emphasis--Students must be able to see the direct relevance of instruction to their own future in the world of work. Such visible relevance helps increase both motivation and learning (Terry and Hargis forthcoming).

The ability to think creatively, make decisions, solve problems, visualize, reason, analyze, interpret, and know how to learn--these skills are most often mentioned in definitions of critical thinking. Characteristics of critical thinkers are perseverance, flexibility, metacognition, transfer of knowledge, problem orientation,open mindedness, use of quality standards, and independence (Lee 1989), a list that resembles many descriptions of the desirable qualities of the future work force. As the nature of work changes and people live and work longer, it is clear that the skills needed for a "40 to 50 year work life" (THINK ABOUT IT, TOO! 1988) are the capacities to learn continuously through thinking and reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and interpersonal competence. These skills are not only critical to work; they are also needed to deal with the increasingly complex spheres of family, community, and society.

Why should vocational education be involved in developing thinking skills? It is often assumed that this is the role of academic education. However, Thomas (1992) cites the following arguments for vocational education's role: (1) occupations are becoming more reliant on cognitive capacities; (2) the changing work environment requires flexibility and adaptability to changing conditions; and (3) vocational education provides a real-world context for cognitive development. "One of the ways to prepare future employees is to teach students how to think instead of what to think" (Chalupa 1992, p. 21).

As the SCANS (1991) report notes, this does not imply a narrow work-focused education. Rather, vocational education is a vehicle for developing the cognitive skills needed for "a productive, full, and satisfying life" (p. vi). Cognitive research demonstrates that (1) learning is not automatically transferred to new settings; (2) context is critical to understanding; (3) passive learning does not develop cognitive management skills; and (4) higher order learning is not a change in behavior but the construction of meaning from experience (Johnson and Thomas 1992; Thomas 1992). Different teaching strategies, alternative assessment methods, and new ways of teacher preparation are needed.

WHAT STRATEGIES DEVELOP THESE SKILLS?

Thomas (1992) identifies three types of cognitive theories upon which teaching strategies can be based. Information processing theory explains how the mind takes in information. Knowledge structure theories depict how knowledge is represented and organized in the mind. Social history theory explains the vital role of cultural context in the development of individual thinking. Together, these three perspectives offer a comprehensive view of cognition. In this view, learning is characterized as an active process in which the learner constructs knowledge as a result of interaction with the physical and social environment. Learning is moving from basic skills and pure facts to linking new information with prior knowledge; from relying on a single authority to recognizing multiple sources of knowledge; from novice-like to expert-like problem solving.

Johnson and Thomas (1992) present five general principles and related teaching methods that integrate aspects of all three perspectives:

• 1. Help Students Organize Their Knowledge. External memory aids such as concept maps (visual representations of concepts and their relationships) ease the information overload on working memory.
• 2. Build on What Students Already Know. Advance organizers such as rules, analogies, or concrete instances help students recognize the similarities between new information and previously acquired knowledge.
• 3. Facilitate Information Processing. Teachers model problem solving, demonstrating their thought processes, strategy selection, and response to mistakes.
• 4. Facilitate Deep Thinking through Elaboration. Cooperative learning techniques such as peer tutoring or paired problem solving (in which one student thinks aloudduring the process of solving a problem) make students observe and modify their own thinking processes.
• 5. Make Thinking Processes Explicit. In reciprocal teaching, the teacher models desired metacognitive processes by reading a paragraph, asking questions, summarizing, and predicting what would happen next in the text. Students gradually take on the teacher's role.

These strategies demonstrate that the teacher's role in developing thinking skills differs from traditional instruction. One metaphor for this new role is "a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage" (Thomas 1992, p.54). The following teacher behaviors promote cognitive development (Chalupa 1992; Lee 1989; Thomas 1992):

• --Requiring justification for ideas and probing for reasoning strategies
• --Confronting students with alternatives and thought- provoking questions
• --Asking open-ended questions
• --Requiring students to be accountable for class discussion
• --Serving as a master of apprentices rather than a teacher of students
• --Using Socratic discussion techniques

Classroom environments that support higher order thinking have the following characteristics (Stasz et al.1990; Thomas 1992): --Reflections of real-life situations and contexts

• --Collaboration among teachers, disciplines, students
• --Encouragement of curiosity, exploration, and investigation
• --Responsibility for learning vested in the learner
• --Failure viewed as a learning opportunity
• --Acknowledgement of effort, not just performance

Chalupa (1992) describes inservice training that helps teachers remodel lesson plans and incorporate knowledge of learning styles in cognitive development. This approach to lesson development involves identifying What is essential for students to know? What is nice to know? What is "fluff"? Learning and teaching styles are assessed by such instruments as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. Higher order thinking objectives specify student performance that requires application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of information (Miller 1990).

Assessing the achievement of higher order thinkingskills is a challenge because the qualities of learners' thinking and knowledge must be observed, not just their results or products (Thomas 1992). Existing right and wrong answer approaches to testing are clearly inadequate. In fact, "assessment" rather than "testing" is recommended (SCANS 1991; Thomas 1992).

New forms of evaluation being developed include the Tailored Response Test, stimulated recall, scenario analysis, and concept mapping. Existing methods such as true/false, multiple choice, and essay can be adapted by having students indicate why an answer is false, asking how two things are similar or different, or requiring evaluation or critique (Chalupa 1992). Scoring can involve giving credit for reasoning (Heyman and Daly 1992).

ED350487 Kerka,-Sandra Higher Order Thinking Skills in Vocational Education. ERIC Digest No. 127. ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career, and Vocational Education, Columbus, Ohio. Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), Washington, DC. EDO-CE-92- 127; 1992 4 p.