O'Neill, Mary Teresa (1999) A Study of the Comparative Experiences of LCVP in Selected Schools. Masters thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
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Abstract
The Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme (LCVP) is part of a range of curriculum
reform at Senior Cycle. This dissertation explores the issues arising from the introduction
and implementation of the LCVP into a selected number of schools with a particular focus
on Saint Anne’s, the target school.
In order to get a clear picture of the situation in these schools, a semi-structured interview
was held with the Co-ordinator of each programme. This instrument was chosen as the most
productive research approach since each co-ordinator, in theory, would be familiar with all
aspects of the programme. In addition one of the Development Officers on the LCVP
Support Team was interviewed in depth. The purpose of this interview was to gain an
insight on implementation from a national perspective. Finally it was considered valuable to
get the perspective of students as well as teachers. These consisted of two distinct groups,
firstly Fifth Year students in the target school who had opted for the programme and
secondly their peers who had decided against the programme or had not been eligible for
inclusion. Their opinions were elicited by means of semi-structured interviews and
questionnaires.
The object of the research was to identify in what way the experience of the target school
echoed that of the other schools and what factors were peculiar to Saint Anne’s. The
introductory chapters of this dissertation set the context for the work by describing the
changes in second-level education in Ireland since the sixties, emphasising particularly the
growing pressure in the early 1990s to develop the vocational dimension of education. Some
of the curricular initiatives introduced to address this need are described and the suite of
programmes that emerged at Senior Cycle is presented with a particular emphasis on the
rationale, content and assessment procedures of the LCVP. The focus of the research is then
narrowed by describing the target school in some detail, particularly its experience of
vocational initiatives and its involvement in curriculum innovation.
The main body of the work analyses the experience of the four control schools in relation to
that of the target school. A number of themes, identifying points of similarity and contrast
between the target school and the others, are employed for comparative purposes. In
addition, student responses are classified and analysed. All this information is set in a
national context by the observations of the Development Officer.
Finally the research sets these results in the context of the general literature of curriculum
innovation. It concludes by offering some comments on the experience of the LCVP in the
target school and implications for future policy.
Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
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Keywords: | Comparative Experiences; LCVP; Schools; |
Academic Unit: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Education |
Item ID: | 5089 |
Depositing User: | IR eTheses |
Date Deposited: | 03 Jul 2014 14:17 |
URI: | https://mu.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/5089 |
Use Licence: | This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here |
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