Competitive Events and Active CTSOs Pay Big Rewards

From January 2009 archived blog
by Sandra Hinesly

I always felt I was privileged to be a career CTE teacher for 30 years, and 25 of those years were at the same school. I had a great job, good CTE friends, and new students every year with a variety of backgrounds, challenges, and personalities. After the first couple of weeks of school, I would introduce information about our youth organization, elect officers, conduct leadership activities, and start talking about competitive event opportunities. I taught cooperative education and as you know our curriculum consists of three components: academics, work experience and the youth organization.

The competitive event activities are considered co-curricular and as I integrated them into my academic curriculum I felt the case studies were an excellent tool for incorporating real-world situations into the classroom. As my co-op students gained more work experience they understood the relevance and value of these case studies as well as appreciated the preparation for competition. The written event research projects are also a great tool for teaching students how to conduct primary and secondary research and re-enforces skills that cross the curriculum such as English and Math. As we prepared for and participated in competition my students and I generated an atmosphere of excitement and anticipation in the classroom.

Working with my students I’ve always realized the vital role that competition and CTSO’s have played in our CTE programs. I know the majority of CTE teachers feel this way as well. However, I recently came across some research from the U.S. Department of Education for Vocational Education Student Organizations and The National Research Center for Career and Technical Education that confirm my beliefs on incorporating competitive events into the curriculum.

The study conducted by the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education hypothesized that, “CTSOs provide a variety of experiences that either directly or indirectly affect three important outcomes of secondary education: achievement, transition to postsecondary education and training, and employability”. What they discovered was a positive association between the amount of student participation and academic motivation, academic engagement, grades, career self-efficacy, college aspirations, and employability skills. Of the four specific organizational elements of CTSOs (leadership, community service, competitions, and professional development), competitions were found to have the most positive effects. (Alfied and Stone 2007) Some of the positive experienced by CTSO members include teamwork, decision-making, competition, leadership, community awareness, career awareness, and personal and social development (Brown, 2002). Students felt teamwork and responsibility were the highest rated items among all variables which explained the value of contests and awards (Alfield and Stone 2007). The results showed that students listed teamwork, responsibility for a project, learning an area of knowledge, competing with others, talking in front of people, learning a specific skill, and learning to win in descending order. Research question #2 (Alfied and Stone 2007) examined changes in outcome variables due to the amount of participation by a student in a CTSO and analysis shows that the more a student is involved the higher their academic motivation, academic engagement, grades, career self-efficacy, college and employability skills (greater participation did not seem to affect civic engagement). You can find out more in-depth information about these studies on the sites listed below.

I am out of the classroom now but I still see some of my ex-students in the community as I shop in the grocery stores and malls. Now they are grown, have their college degrees, and families and they are the store managers and store directors. I have to smile because once we get past, “Do you remember me?” the next question is always, “Do you remember when we went on that trip to district or state or national conference for competition?” and they want to talk about what event they did and how they placed and what we saw and did on the trip. It is always the good times and the students and friends they got to meet from other schools. These are experiences that last a lifetime. To me this is verification of the research that CTSOs and participation in competitive events make a positive impact on the lives of our high school students and it is this type of feedback that keeps our CTE teachers inspired.

References

1. Alfield, Corinne and Stone, James R. (2007). Looking Inside the Black Box: The Value Added by Career and Technical Student Organizations to Students’ High School Experience. National Research Center for Career and Technical Education, University of Minnesota, Minnesota.
2. What is a CTSO? Policy of the United States Department of Education For Vocational Education Student Organizations. http://www.nmctso.com/about.php