| This study identified how performance evaluation and performance evaluation instruments are utilized by secondary school Industrial Education instructors in Area Vocational Technical Schools (AVTS) in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Vocational Education is responsible for producing skilled, efficient workers necessary to maintain a vital, sound domestic economy and world competitiveness. Students' lack of basic and technical skills in this country, resulting in a lack of skilled workers in the marketplace, has placed the United States under increasing scrutiny, and resulted in its declining competitive position worldwide. This study helped reveal methods used by Industrial Education instructors teaching in the AVTSs of Pennsylvania to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate students' skills. To achieve this, the study identified: (1) to what extent Industrial Education instructors understand state mandates requiring performance evaluation of students' technical psychomotor skills; (2) the degree to which Industrial Education instructors are using performance evaluation instruments to assess their students' technical psychomotor skills; (3) types of performance evaluation instruments in use; (4) a common core of components to serve as a basic model for performance evaluation instruments; and (5) the degree to which Industrial Education instructors include the core components as part of their system of technical psychomotor skill evaluation.;The responses of 796 Industrial Education instructors on fourteen questions in the survey instrument, "The Utilization Of Performance Evaluation Instruments By Industrial Education Instructors", were analyzed. Results show that the Industrial Education instructors: (1) are aware that they are required by law to evaluate students' technical psychomotor skills, and that the majority of the instructors identified the specific components of Pennsylvania's technical occupational programs; (2) evaluate the technical psychomotor skills of their students using competency lists and checklists to complete visual evaluation or inspection, or they use self-developed written evaluation forms; (3) use self-developed (67.9%) or comercially developed (23.8%) performance evaluation instruments, or both; and (4) include, to some degree, all of the core components, identified in the literature as being crucial to the development of performance evaluation instruments.;Ten core components were identified in the literature as crucial to the development of performance evaluation instruments. |
