Relevance of the Senior High School Curriculum in Relation to Contextual Reality of the World of Work
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Date
2019-02-20
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Abstract
Issues relating to relevance of a curriculum have been of interest to educationists due to public yelps without resorting to empirical evidence. The senior high school is a terminating point for most of the graduating students making most of them unemployed. This mass unemployment of the youth after senior high school has mostly been attributed to the irrelevance of the curriculum. However, the skills in the curriculum have not been subjected to critical analysis to empirically prove their relevance or otherwise. The purpose of the study was therefore to identify the skills embedded in the curriculum, those skills the learners have acquired and those that employers usually demand of employees by relating them to empirical findings of the skills employers in general demand of employees. A conceptual analysis through content analysis approach was used to quantitatively determine the skills embedded in the curriculum. A qualitative analysis was then used to examine the richness of the skills. This ultimately led to purposive sampling procedure in which twenty-one students and fourteen key informants were selected for an interview. The data from the interview were sorted out into themes and coded through the use of NVivo 8 to help in the counting of frequencies of each skill. It was found out that the senior high school curriculum, though was generally rated as relevant, the skills with the highest frequencies in the curriculum focused on attitudes and values while those required by employers focused on the application of knowledge. The skills with the highest frequencies were those of the affective domain but the highest percentage values suggested in the curriculum constituted those of the cognitive domain. On the basis of these findings, it can be concluded that the curriculum is relevant in instilling values into the students but it is not relevant in the application of knowledge that employers usually demand of employees at the work environment. It is, therefore, recommended that the curriculum be reviewed, if similar findings of this type of research in different contexts are found, to get rid of those mismatches, in order to make it more relevant to the needs of contemporary society.
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Contextual reality, curricular relevance, senior high school, relation, world of work