Targeted In-Depth Assessment of Promising Practices in Secondary Vocational Education— What

This paper concentrates on a strategy that uses schoolwide data to identify secondary schools where students’ academic achievement has been improving at a relatively fast rate, and other schools where it has not. Schools with the most involvement in vocational education can be selected from the group where achievement is increasing relatively fast, and from the group where it is not. These two sets of schools can then be compared in depth, to describe how vocational education is being used in each case. The in-depth study can supplement measures of academic achievement with other measures of student attainment, including work-related knowledge and skills. The results will answer two questions: