Teaching and Assessing Soft Skills - MASS - Measuring and ...

Table 4
Basic characteristics of the MASS pilot groups
Country Group Description No of
UK
1. Full time SkillZone students
2. Part time SkillZone students
3. “Skills for Work” (part time)
Students
30
20
12
No of
teachers
5 (overall)
GR Regular school students 22 4
SW Regular students (2 groups) 35 5
RO Vocational Students (5groups) 60 20
NL
1. Multi-sector orientation
2. Healthcare orientation
UK groups no 1 and 2 (from now on referred as UK - 1 and UK - 2, respectively) are regular
SkillZone groups, as described earlier in this paper. Group no 3, “Skills for Work” (from now
on referred as UK-3), comprise 12 student hairdressers, who were sent to SkillZone from
another department of the College, as lacking soft skills. They attended SkillZone in a part
time basis.
SW groups are unemployed young people who have been registered at the Public
Employment Service for at least three months.
RO collaborated with vocational colleges in the area of Bucharest, because, as a Teacher
Training Centre, it does not have students itself.
NL groups are both in MBO-1 level. In the Netherlands, there are a number of different
forms of vocational education, each for different age groups and with different goals. After
leaving primary school, all pupils are required to enter secondary education where they
choose between general secondary education (HAVO/VWO, age 12‐17/18) and pre‐
vocational education (VMBO, age 12‐16). Pre‐vocational education serves as a preparation
for vocational education (MBO, age 16‐20), taken at a Regional Training Centre (in Dutch:
Regionaal Opleidings Centrum, ROC).
NL group no 1 (from now on referred as NL – 1) had multi-sector orientation, while group no
2 (from now on referred as NL – 2) had a healthcare orientation.
All groups, except the UK ones, are representative samples of the students of each
institution. They are not specially selected. This means that we may generalise the trends
observed rather safely, thus becoming able to speculate about the effectiveness of the MASS
approach for the respective populations, not just the samples examined. It should be noted,
however, that the samples used in the study were small, making generalisations to
population limited, limiting the generalisations to trends speculations.
In total, 213 students and 49 teachers/trainers participated in the MASS pilot.
14
20
7
8
92