An independent evaluation of the Ar...

An independent evaluation of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) Career Exploration Program was actionsed using nationally representative samples of high denomination students. The sample consisted of circulating ASVAB Program participants (n = 255) and sum of two units control groups of nonparticipants (n = 233 n = 189) A pretest-posttest design showed that participation in the ASVAB Program increased career exploration knowledge and reduc diffusion and approach-approach forms of career indecision, as assessed through the Career Decision Scale ( Osipow, 1986)

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The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) Career Exploration Program is undivided of the largest career exploration programs in the world. Annually, it forwards between 800,000 and 900,000 high institute and postsecondary students in more than 14000 seminarys nationwide. This means that more than united fourth of all high educate seniors will have participated in the ASVAB Program during their high institute years (Baker, 2000).

Since its inception in 1968 the ASVAB Program has undergone considerable and substantial revision. The rife version, fielded in 1992, is a cooperative endeavor between the nation's instructs and the Department of Defense (DoD). The ASVAB Program provides a comprehensive vocational assessment package at no take away from to participating schools or to their scholars Funded entirely by the DoD, this comprehensive package contains brace major assessment instruments and a number of exercises that help scholars identify and investigate occupations for which they point out to interest and ability. The ASVAB Program fulfills brace major purposes. First, the program provides age and developmentally appropriate materials to support high place of education and postsecondary educational and career counseling. In this regard, the ASVAB Program assists scholars in planning for their post-high academy years. Whether these plans include the pursuit of postsecondary education, do job-work training opportunities, or immediate ingress into the world of work, the ASVAB Program provides materials to enhance students' career exploration and career choices. other the program is useful to the military services as an aid in the proces of identifying interested scholars who meet the qualifications for entrance into the U Armed Forces (Defense Manpower Data Center 1995)

In 1995 the DoD contracted with the American Institutes of Research to demeanor a thorough review and evaluation of the ASVAB Career Exploration Program. This evaluation focused forward the program's influence on close examiner career choice and development, program implementation, the quality of the career guidance materials and component parts the adequacy of the technical underpinnings of the program, and the program's issue on military recruiting. Questionnaires and interviews were used to bring together the relevant data from nationally representative samples of nonparticipating learners current-year program participants, prior-year program participants, and high institute counselors. In general, the findings indicated that although there are substantial inflection for sex differences in why students pick to participate in the ASVAB Program, about three quarters of the two male and female adolescents participate because they want to engage in career exploration. Consistent with this, about a third of the scholars who elect not to participate do for a like reason because they fail to descry the relevancy of the ASVAB Program to their career goals and plans. Compared with their nonparticipating matchs the students who participated indicated an increase in several career disentanglement areas during the course of this subject of attention For example, they reported relative gains in self-knowledge, occupational knowledge, and ways to be joined the two together. Furthermore, although students' attitudes and speculations may have changed considerably because of participation, their career exploration behavior did not change. The merely behavior that was found to increase more for participants than for nonparticipants was interaction with recruiters. whole details of this evaluation are available elsewhere (Defense Manpower Data Center 2000)

A technical document no longer available to the public (Levine, Huberman, & Wall, 1996) and a vocational newsletter of the present days brief (Wall, 1996) reported the results of the ASVAB Program forward career exploration and career indecision. Using the same evaluation data, the at hand study differs from these previous studies in brace important ways. First, rather than examine the career exploration items separately, the items were combined to create a Career Exploration Knowledge Scale. The use of this scale provides a more coherent and systematic analysis of the ASVAB Program's validity on career exploration. Second, the previous reports analyzed the Career Decision Scale (CDS; Osipow, 1986) as a unidimensional measure of career indecision. In contrast, the not away study relied on the four factor analytically derived CD subscales reported by way of Vondracek and his colleagues (Schulenberg, Shimizu, Vondracek, & Hostetler 1988; Shimizu, Vondracek, Schulenberg, & Hostetler 1988; Vondracek, Hostetler Schulenberg, & Shimizu, 1990)