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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 92 (2013) 358 - 363
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Aspects Related to Counselling and Guidance in Science Lessons
Contexts
Gabriel Gorghiu a*, Laura Monica Gorghiub, Ana-Maria Petrescuc, Lumini^a Mihaela
Draghicescuc
aElectrical Engineering Faculty, Valahia University Targoviste, 18-24 Unirii Blvd., 130082 Targoviste, Romania bFaculty of Sciences and Arts, Valahia University Targoviste, 18-24 Unirii Blvd., 130082 Targoviste, Romania _cTeacher Training Department, Valahia University Targoviste, 5 Moldovei str., 130093 Targoviste, Romania_
Abstract
Choosing a profession is an important and complex process for each student. Basically, the quality of this process depends on the individual's entire existence, with implications on personal, social and professional levels. But the career planning involves, in turn, a series of related aspects: pedagogical knowledge, educational guidance, counselling and career guidance, etc. This cannot be done only in the special offices for pedagogical assistance or in tutoring classes. Within each disciplines, through valorising various pedagogical contents, teachers must envisage the fulfilment of specific objectives that target the area of counselling and career guidance.
Starting from the mentioned premises, the paper aims to identify the extent to which the teaching approaches developed in Science subject contexts (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) contributes to the objectives related to career planning and counselling. In this respect, the paper presents an investigative démarche, considering a sample of 185 Romanian students from upper secondary level (11th and 12th grades) who were questioned concerning several issues to emphasize the skills / qualifications needed for specific professions, identifying strengths and weaknesses that define the student's personality, highlighting key-characteristics of different professions, etc. The processing of qualitative and quantitative data collected from the questionnaires allows us to formulate reliable conclusions about the role and contribution of Science subjects for students, with the view of taking relevant decisions and influencing the future career.
©2013TheAuthors.PublishedbyElsevierLtd.
Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Lumen Research Center in Social and Humanistic Sciences, Asociatia Lumen. Keywords: counseling; career guidance; educational guidance; occupation; profession;
* Corresponding author. Phone.: +40-245-217683; fax: +40-245-217683. E-mail address: ggorghiu@yahoo.com
1877-0428 © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Lumen Research Center in Social and Humanistic Sciences, Asociatia Lumen. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.08.685
1. Introduction
School guidance represents a system of educational measures and actions undertaken by the responsible factors from within school, as a formal training institution, in order to facilitate the choice of a certain educational institution or of a certain study domain. This choice must be made in compliance with a dynamic balance between the pupil's personality profile and the specific tuition demands of the educational institution he/she has in view.
Professional guidance constitutes a process going beyond the boundaries of school life, encompassing an individual's entire active existence, professionally. Just like school guidance, professional guidance implies a harmonization of the individual's personality shape with the demands of the society he is part of. Actually, "school guidance is a premise for professional guidance and professional guidance represents a conclusion and a validation of school guidance." (Tompa, 1996).
Professional guidance represents that component of the psycho-pedagogical counselling related to the support given by a counsellor (teacher, headmaster, psycho-pedagogue, etc), with a view to choose a profession, a professional domain and even a professional career.
Vocation represents an inclination, according to some authors, even native, a person has towards a certain socio-professional activity he/she wishes to exercise and for which he/she shows a particular interest. So, vocational counselling represents the process through which the counsellor helps the pupil to make an optimal choice concerning his studies or his professional career, through the use of his internal, volitional, motivational and skill-related fervours.
According to the Romanian Explanatory Dictionary (DEX), ocupafia (occupation) is an activity, with a longer or shorter duration, that someone is doing, while profesia (profession) constitutes a work, an activity based on a certain theoretical knowledge and practical habits, acquired through adequate qualification and certification (www.dex-online.ro).
We have started our investigative approach from the clarification of these concepts related to the domain of counselling and professional guidance as we have considered it absolutely necessary to have a clear semantic and epistemological delineation of the terms used.
2. The approach of counselling and professional guidance made in the context of the Sciences (Chemistry, Physics, Biology)
The pupils' counselling and professional guidance represents an obviously interdisciplinary process as, in this context, a multitude of psychological, social, political, economic, ergonomic, medical or physiological aspects are taken into account.
Therefore, counselling and professional guidance need to take into account aspects such as: the pupils' personality features, their theoretical and methodological skills, their interests and preoccupations, their degree of compatibility - from a medical, physiological perspective - with a certain profession, with the labour force demand on a local, regional, national level, in relation to the respective profession, etc. Not negligible are also a series of other aspects concerning: the evolution of the demographic indexes, the dynamics of the employment, the social perception of a certain profession, its social appreciation, etc.
In the process of counselling and professional guidance three significant factors are involved, namely: school, as an educational institution, the pupil's family and the pupil himself/herself.
What interests us in the present study is to highlight the role of school in general and of the training approaches made in the Sciences disciplines (Chemistry, Physics and Biology) in particular, in the sense of the realization of the objectives of counselling and professional guidance for pupils.
It is unanimously accepted that the educational process, during which knowledge is assimilated, skills get shaped, interests and aptitudes are cultivated, personality features are modelled, etc., constitutes at the same time an important context and tool for achieving the objectives of counselling and professional guidance.
A defining feature of counselling and professional guidance is its educative, formative character. Seen from a psycho-pedagogical perspective, the activity of counselling and professional guidance implies, par excellence, the education, formtion and training of the pupil in order to make a realistic scholar and professional choice.
Here we are dealing with a long term training process, in the pursuit of knowledge, formation and development of the pupils' personality, in order to realize some adequate school and professional options and optimal socio-professional integration. School, by means of the teaching staff, directly influences the young people's professional options through its organizational structures, through the contents it bears, through the didactic strategies and forms of organization used, the pedagogical relations developed during the lessons and in the class of pupils, the teacher's charisma, etc.
Regardless of the discipline they teach, teachers constitute an important factor of counselling and guidance, everywhere in the educational systems. So, during the lessons, the objectives of counselling and professional guidance are realized, even though not always in an explicit manner. Numerous studies attest the fact that the preference for an educational discipline triggers the choice of a certain professional category and, vice-versa, the interest for a certain profession increases the pupil's interest for the disciplines closest to it.
Consequently, the teachers who teach disciplines from the domain of Sciences can contribute to the counselling and the professional guidance of the pupils through activities aiming at: a good psycho-pedagogical knowledge of every pupil, highlighting each pupil's dominant features of personality, interests, motivations, attitudes and skills, informing pupils about the professions having to do with the discipline taught (physicist, chemist, biologist, etc.), training and developing the specific, theoretical and methodological, skills needed to exercise this profession, permanently counselling, advising and guiding the pupil in the process of choosing a profession.
Next, in relation to the basic components of the educational process we shall formulate a few ideas with a value of applicative principles, which the teachers of Sciences (Chemistry, Physics, Biology) should keep in mind, in order to attain certain objectives specific to counselling and professional guidance:
• They should be permanently concerned by the creation of a positive and stimulating educational environment during the lessons and at the level of the class;
• They should demonstrate at the same time professional-scientific skills, pedagogical tact and psycho-pedagogical knowledge;
• They should often use interactive-participative methods, meant to determine the pupils to interact, to actively participate to the activities, using all their potential strengths;
• They should permanently adapt the lessons' content (within the limits allowed by the school program) and the didactic strategy used, to the pupils' interests and needs;
• They should have a thorough knowledge of their pupils and of the class as a whole;
• They should design and use learning experiences meant to familiarize the pupils with the specific approach of a scientific investigation;
• They should organize educational contexts allowing the pupils to make the transfer from theory to practice, from science to profession;
• They should encourage the pupils to have a positive attitude towards science and towards the professional activities related to it;
• They should focus on the development of the skills of communication, interrelation and learning through cooperation, on the level of the class of pupils;
• They should be permanently concerned with the development of the pupils' spirit of observation, analytical, critical and self-critical spirit, and with the cultivation of their logical reasoning, specific to sciences;
• They should turn to good use and they should develop, in the context of the lessons of Sciences, their own and their pupils' multiple intelligences, empathic capacities and socio-emotional skills;
• They should be open to what is new, to change, demonstrating flexibility in relation to the contents taught, the teaching-learning strategies and the evaluation tools used (Mojoc, Popa, and Petrescu, 1999).
3. Methodology
The counselling and professional guidance gains a real value in Science lessons context. Generally, Science subjects really emphasize certain aspects strongly related to professional guidance. In this respect, in the frame of the training programme "PROFILES - Education through Sciences", organized with the support of the FP7 European Research Project "PROFILES - Professional Reflection-Oriented Focus on Inquiry-based Learning and Education through Science" (PROFILES Consortium, 2010), it was tried to be expressed the extent to which the teaching approaches developed in Science subject contexts contributes to the objectives related to the career planning and counselling. In this sense, 185 Romanian students from upper secondary level (11th and 12th grades) were asked to level the importance of various issues, through specific questionnaires for assessment of the Motivational Learning Environment - MoLE (Bolte, 2006).
The practical part of this research tried to identify the role of the instructional approaches taken within the Sciences disciplines (Chemistry, Physics and Biology) towards the objectives of counselling and professional orientation. The students answered by checking the related level from a six-level assessment scale: fully disagree, mostly disagree, rather disagree, rather agree, mostly agree, and fully agree. The students took into consideration their answers in relation to the same scale and same issues, addressed from two perspectives: the importance of the issues mentioned and the specific role of that issue registered in the Science lessons contexts.
The limits of the research derived from the impossibility to capture all the detailed aspects that offer an image to the extent to which Science disciplines contribute to the achieving of the professional counselling and guidance objectives. In this research, qualitative data are processed, more specific to an observational study and research, targeting to the quality of the pedagogical relations, curriculum management and valorisation of the emotional intelligence from both perspectives: students and teachers.
4. Results and Discussion
The discussion is oriented on performing a comparison between student's opinions related to the importance of certain aspects for themselves and personal life, and student's opinions concerning the roles of those aspects in the Science lessons.
In this respect, figures 1-5 target to take into consideration the following issues: awareness of what should be good at in respect of different occupations requiring formal training (figure 1), knowing the main tasks of different occupations requiring formal training (figure 2), knowing what is expected from the trainees in different occupations requiring formal training (figure 3), knowing the personal strengths (figure 4) and the personal weaknesses (figure 5).
In the first two cases, the students' feedback is grouped to the "right" area (rather agree - mostly agree - fully agree), with a slight account for the role of the analyzed aspects in Science lessons oriented to the central area (rather disagree - rather agree - mostly agree). In the following cases, the students' feedback is strongly oriented to the "right" area (rather agree - mostly agree - fully agree), the Science lessons playing an important role. More than that, for knowing the personal strengths and weaknesses, Science lessons are seen to cover almost two-thirds of the scale, which means that the related theory, methodology and practical activities form an important basis for starting to advise and guide the students for choosing a profession.
On the whole, the results illustrate that Science lessons underline the act of counselling and guidance, offering the possibilities of enriching various experiential backgrounds and also to train the students as the future good specialists and leaders in their area of expertise related to Science areas.
H I I 111 Il 11 11111
fully mostly rather rather mostly fully e disagree agree agree agree
How important is the aspect for you and your life right now I Which role the same aspect plays in Science lessons
ri 11 Vi 11
n I I I
fully mostly rather rather mostly fully agree agree agree
How important is the aspect for you and your life right now ■ Which role the same aspect plays in Science lessons
Fig. 1. Students' feedback related to the aspect: "awareness of what one should be good at in respect of different occupations requiring formal training"
Fig. 2. Students' feedback related to the aspect: "knowledge of the main tasks of different occupations requiring formal training"
How important is the aspect for you and your life right now ■ Which role the same aspect plays in Science lessons
fully mostly rather rather mostly fully disagree disagree disagree agree agree agree
100 80 60 40 20 0
How important is the aspect for you and your life right now ■ Which role the same aspect plays in Science lessons
fully mostly rather rather mostly fully disagree disagree disagree agree agree agree
Fig. 3. Students' feedback related to the aspect: "knowledge of what is expected from the trainees in different occupations requiring formal training"
Fig. 4. Students' feedback related to the aspect: "knowledge of my strengths"
fully mostly rather rather mostly fully disagree disagree disagree agree agree agree
How important is the aspect for you and your life right now ■ Which role the same aspect plays in Science lessons
Fig. 5. Students' feedback related to the aspect: "knowledge of my weaknesses"
5. Conclusion
The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data collected from MoLE questionnaires offers the possibility to formulate some conclusions about the role and contribution of Science lessons in order to lead the students to relevant decisions that may influence their future career. In this respect, the students' opinions proved that they are really aware of certain aspects, such as: what one should be good at in respect of different occupations requiring formal training, which are the main tasks of different occupations requiring formal training and what is expected from the trainees in different occupations requiring formal training.
In addition, the students' answers emphasized that most of they admitted that in order to take a serious decision concerning their future career they have to identify not only their strengths, but also their weaknesses and the way that those points can influence throughout their career. A great part of the questioned students agreed that Science lessons can play an important role in identifying their strengths and weaknesses, but there are also other students who are not making the connection between those aspects and the topics studied during the Science lessons. For the last of them, even the counselling and guidance performed in connection to Science lessons remain very important.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded through the Seventh Framework Programme "PROFILES - Professional Reflection Oriented Focus on Inquiry-based Learning and Education through Science" No. 5.2.2.1 - SiS-2010-2.2.1, Grant Agreement No. 266589, Supporting and coordinating actions on innovative methods in Science education: teacher training on inquiry based teaching methods on a large scale in Europe. The support offered by the European Commission in the fields of research and innovation, through the project mentioned above, is gratefully acknowledged.
References
Bolte, C. (2006). As Good as It Gets: The MoLE-Instrument for the Evaluation of Science Instruction. The Annual Meeting of the National Association for the Research on Science Education (NARST). San Francisco, USA: Polyscript.
Mojoc, H., Popa, T, & Petrescu, A. M. (1999). Ghid de consiliere §i orientare pentru clasele V-VIII (Counceling and Guidance Guide for V-VIIIgrades) (pp. 23-24). Targovi§te: Macarie Publishing House.
Tom§a, Gh. (coord.) (1996). Dicfionar de orientare §colara §i profesionatii (Dictionary of School and Professional Guidance) (pp. 82). Bucharest: Afeliu Publishing House.
*** PROFILES Consortium. (2010). FP7 Negotiation Guidance Notes - Coordination and Support Actions. Annex I - Description of Work. Unpublished.
