JITE v44n3 From the Editor - JITE v44n3
FROM THE EDITOR
Welcome, Readers, to Volume 44 Number 3 of the Journal of Industrial Teacher Education (JITE). As I did in the previous two issues, I begin this editorial message with a word from our sponsor, the National Association of Industrial and Technical Teacher Educators (NAITTE). Please be reminded that Volume 45 will initiate the publication of three issues per volume rather than four.
In This Issue
The articles that comprise this issue are aligned with the central theme of effective instruction as it occurs in traditional and non-traditional settings within the broadly defined field of career and technical education.
For example, James Mohler investigated, “…differences between the spatial experiences of those classified as high and low in spatial ability” (p. 8). Using a phenomenological framework, this qualitative investigation of the experiences of freshmen engineering students enrolled in an Introduction to Graphics for Manufacturing course resulted in, “…the emergence of an instructional method to help students create pictorial drawings from multiview drawings, a task common in engineering drawings” (p. 9).
How do we know that our carefully planned professional development intervention has produced the desired changes on the participants? Jeff Allen and Kim Nimon present evidence that the inclusion of a retrospective pretest can increase the likelihood of gathering reliable data to answer that question. In their application of the technique…employing a retrospective pretest in conjunction with a posttest provided conference stakeholders with information to relate levels of learning to groups of participants and presentation context” (p. 38).
If Project Lead The Way, a pre-engineering problem-solving curriculum, has been adopted by the Indiana Department of Education as part of Technology Education, then why has the goal of at least 40% implementation within the school districts not been achieved? C.J. Shields decided to seek answers to that question by surveying principals employed in the 75% majority of schools in which PLTW has not been implemented. His results revealed,
Regardless of the fact that non-PLTW Indiana principals agreed that PLTW was a useful and valid part of the TE curriculum they believed the greatest barrier to implementing PLTW was cost, both of the cost of the PLTW equipment and of the PLTW summer training. (p. 66)
Finally, Kerri Kearney, et al, provide us with an example of applying the fundamental principles of career and technical education, “…work-based education, experienced-based learning, partnership building, continual improvement and innovation, and meeting context specific demands to solve problems” (p. 72), in a partnership with the Defense Ammunition Center in McAlester, Oklahoma. The authors discuss the characteristics and challenges that shaped this partnership created to address the, “…disconnect between the current QASAS preparation process and actual job competencies required in the field” (p. 72).
Enjoy!