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Career examples help, research shows
Students who can link studies, careers improve on tests, other measures
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Published: January 30, 2009
Connect the classroom to possible careers and it could help middle-school students test better on end-of-grade state tests and narrow the achievement gap between white, black and Hispanic students.
That's what's happened in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools as a result of the CareerStart program, a study shows.
CareerStart is a program that ties sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade core lessons to information about possible careers. It was integrated into curriculums at every middle school in the system in 2007.
The program focuses on math, language arts, science and social studies in middle grades.
When teachers give middle-school students examples of how to apply lessons to possible careers, some students performed better in schools, had improved behavior and had significant drops in unexcused absences, according to the recent study by the school system and UNC Chapel Hill.
Stephen Davies, an eighth-grade math teacher at Clemmons Middle, said that the real-world applications of CareerStart encourage his students to work collaboratively in problem-solving.
CareerStart "lessons for math incorporate a variety of concepts and they help to reinforce the concepts for the students," Davies said. "It extends and refines the material from the classroom and it promotes some lateral thinking on the students' parts."
Eighth-graders in the school system here were more likely than others to be proficient on state end-of-grade math and reading tests if their seventh- and eighth-grade teachers regularly used CareerStart examples to illustrate their classroom lessons, the study shows.
And the achievement gap was largely closed between black, white and Hispanic students when teachers used career examples, said Dennis Orthner, a professor in the School of Social Work at UNC Chapel Hill. Orthner created the program with the help of school-system officials.
All of the study findings are based on an analysis of about 3,500 middle-school students in the school system. Those students' academic performances were tracked from fifth- to eighth grade.
CareerStart serves about 15,000 students in several North Carolina school systems, including the Davie, Stokes, Surry and Thomasville systems.
But research of the program has been conducted in only Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, Orthner said. Orthner and Superintendent Don Martin started the program here in 2004.
The program gets middle-schoolers thinking about possible careers, Orthner said.
"We're not asking teachers to teach something new," he said. "We're just asking teachers to give examples when they teach … show that there are people out there that actually use these lessons."
■ Lisa Boone-Wood can be reached at 727-7232 or at lboone-wood@wsjournal.com.
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