Trends in Career and Technical Education Research

Hutchinson and Lovell (2004) observed that professional journals serve an important function. They offer a mechanism by which professionals communicate ideas, stimulate discussion (as well as controversy), and share information, often in the form of research findings‖ (p. 383). Given the key role peer-reviewed journals play in the development, promotion, and maintenance of a profession, periodic examinations of scholarly journals are a widely-reported practice across education and social science professions (Bangert & Baumberger, 2005; Elmore & Woehlke, 1998; Goodwin & Goodwin, 1985; Rojewski, 1997).


Sources of Literature
The primary sources of literature for this review included all research articles published in three refereed scholarly journals-Career and Technical Education Research, Journal of Career and Technical Education, and Journal of Industrial Teacher Education-during a recent 3-year period (2002, 2003, and 2004).These journals were purposefully selected for their focus on career and technical education.
Results from this review provide an indication of the trends and issues reflected in what we termed " unsolicited research.‖It is unsolicited in the sense that the scholarship published in these journals reflects the interests of independent researchers working on personal agendas, as opposed to making pre-determined contributions to a unified or coordinated agenda.Results show the range of topics and issues of importance to researchers in the field.

Content Review: Instrumentation
We developed a coding sheet, similar to the one described by Hutchinson and Lovell (2004), to guide our content analysis of each article included in the three journals we selected for review.The coding sheet included sections for recording information on identifying characteristics, type and design of article, main research topic, main source of data, and data analysis methods.
Prior to beginning our review we excluded several types of contributions from consideration including introductions and book reviews.We followed the protocol described by Hutchinson and Lovell (2004) by developing operational definitions for the non-statistical aspects of our data collection, including article type and design, the research topic, and main source of data.For type, articles were coded into one of four possible categories: expository/opinion (e.g., editorial in nature), expository/conceptual supported by data (no original data collection), original research (qualitative or quantitative), and literature review.All articles that described original quantitative research were classified as belonging to one of four distinct research designs, including descriptive, causal comparative (ex post facto), quasi-experimental, and experimental.
The main source of data for each article was coded as being generated by survey (questionnaire), tests or outcome measures (scales or inventories with psychometric properties reported), interview (face-to-face, e-mail, telephone), documents (school reports, internal memos, newsletters), or observation.Our list of data analysis methods for quantitative studies was fashioned after the list used previously by Goodwin and Goodwin (1985) and Swanson and Alford (1987).This approach grouped analyses into three groups-basic (statistics typically covered in a first semester, introductory-level course), intermediate (statistics taught in a second or third semester course), and advanced (statistics normally requiring classes for a fourth semester or more)-based on the degree of training needed to conduct and interpret the analysis.Since many of the studies we examined conducted multiple statistical analyses, we coded analyses in terms of their sophistication-only the most sophisticated technique was recorded for each article.
We recorded the institutional affiliation of authors using a simple method devised by Howard, Cole, and Maxwell (1987) for assigning numeric value for the relative contributions of authors to published research, based on the assumptions that authorship order reflects the relative contribution of each author and that as the number of authors increases, the relative contribution of each author diminishes (American Psychological Association, 2002)  Three-quarters of all articles reflected a descriptive research or investigative design.Data provided in Table 2 reveals that two-thirds of CTER and JCTE articles and 81.5% of JITE articles were identified as descriptive.Qualitative, causal-comparative, and quasi-experimental designs were each utilized 7-10% of the time.CTER authors (14.6%) were twice as likely as those in JITE (7.4%) to utilize qualitative research designs.A dramatic difference exists in the use of causal-comparative designs, where 14.6% of CTER and 17.7% of JCTE articles reflected this type of design.In contrast, only 9.3% of JITE articles reflected a causal comparative design.

Research Topics
The 129 articles included in our review were sorted into 5 pre-determined categories reflecting the general trends, priorities, and themes emanating from federal policy and legislation pertaining to secondary career and technical education.These categories were accountability, articulation and transition, career pathways and course sequencing, integration of academic and career-technical education, and recruitment and retention of career and technical education professionals.During the sorting process (and accounting for our simultaneous review of postsecondary articles), a category containing articles on online/distance education and instructional methods and strategies was added.Data in Table 3 indicates that this instructionfocused research accounted for 19.4% of articles published during the 3-year reporting period.A miscellaneous category was also used to group topics not easily incorporated into one of the preexisting categories.In this latter category, a group of articles focusing on student characteristics and related student issues emerged, accounting for 10.1% of published work.An additional 16 articles (12.4%) focused on various aspects of the field, including research issues (e.g., design and methods) and current status.The topic of recruitment and retention of CTE professionals garnered the largest number of articles from our review.Almost one-quarter (n=31) of the articles dealt with various aspects of teacher preparation, certification, and the experiences and needs of first-year career-technical teachers.Alternative instructional delivery (n=10) and instructional methods (n=15) composed slightly less than 20 percent of the articles.Numerous instructional approaches were addressed in these articles such as cognitive and traditional apprenticeship, contextual teaching-learning, and job shadowing.Topics addressing accountability, most often student achievement, represented 12.4% of the total.Standardized testing, student proficiency, and industry standards were several of the topics included in this category.
Data collection methods were classified using 5 primary types and results are reflective of the types of articles published.Data in Table 4 shows that approximately one-third of articles relied on surveys to collect data.Fifteen of the 34 JCTE articles used survey (44.1%), compared to about one-quarter of the articles for CTER (24.4%) and JITE (29.6%).Another one-third of articles with the JITE was most likely to use written documents (n=26, 48.2%), while JCTE was least likely (17.7%).Selected CTE Journals, 2002-2004 Source of data 2002 2003 2004 2002 2003 2004 2002 2003  Data in Table 5 identifies that slightly over 70% (n=48) of quantitative research articles reported basic statistics for data analysis, which included descriptive (44.2%) or one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA; 16.9%) procedures.A majority of articles in both JCTE and JITE relied on basic statistics; 75.0% and 80.8%, respectively.In contrast, only about one-half of CTER articles (57.1%) relied on descriptive statistics as the primary means of analyzing research data.Onequarter of all articles (25.4%) used intermediate statistics such as factorial ANOVA, multiple regression, or factor analysis.When examined by journal, CTER (33.3%) was more likely to publish articles using these more sophisticated analyses than JCTE (25.0%) or JITE (19.2%).Only two articles using advanced statistics (multiple analysis of variance, structural equation modeling) were identified, both published in CTER.

TABLE 4 Sources of Data for Research Studies Published in
CTER=Career and Technical Education Research, JCTE=Journal of Career and Technical Education, JITE=Journal of Industrial Teacher Education.Totals may not equal 100.0%due to rounding error.a Column percentages reflect total number of studies using some type of statistical analysis, per volume.scores are useful in tracking institutional contribution to the body of literature in a particular discipline.Institutional affiliation, or institutional productivity, was "c ompiled on the basis of frequency and order of authorship.A single authored article netted that author's institution a single unit of credit.In multiple authored articles, credit was assigned proportionately‖ (p.976).Thus, the productivity index represented the relative contribution of authors/institutions to the research literature, higher scores representing greater contribution.Scores lower than 1.0 indicate that the author/institution contributed less than the equivalent of 1 journal article to the research literature in the selected journals.
We present only the top producing institutions, indicated here by a contribution of 1 or more published articles.This approach is in line with previous research examining the scholarly productivity of authors and institutions (Howard et al., 2005;Loveland et al., 2006).We initially separated institutional productivity scores into 2 groups, those with total combined scores equal to or greater than 1.0 and those with scores less than 1.0.Since our purpose was to identify leading contributors to the research literature, we did not further examine the institutional affiliation of authors with productivity scores less than 1.0 (n=38).For authors/institutions in this group, total contribution to the literature was less than the equivalent of 1 article.
Education Research, JCTE=Journal of Career and Technical Education, JITE=Journal of Industrial Teacher Education.Column totals (% per volume series) may not equal 100.0%due to rounding error.
Education Research, JCTE=Journal of Career and Technical Education, JITE=Journal of Industrial Teacher Education.Column totals (% per volume series) may not equal 100.0%due to rounding error.
. Howard et al.'s formula to calculate contribution scores is:

TABLE 1
Research, by Type, Published in Selected CTE Scholarly Journals, 2002-2004 CTER=Career and Technical Education Research, JCTE=Journal of Career and Technical Education, JITE=Journal of Industrial Teacher Education.Column totals (% per volume series) may not equal 100.0%due to rounding error.

TABLE 5
Types of Data Analysis in S-2004s Published bySelected CTE Journals, 2002-2004