JVER v28n2 - Editor's Note

Editor's Note

Joe W. Kotrlik
Louisiana State University

Once again, I wish to thank Jay Rojewski and Morgan Lewis for the excellent support and advice I have received from them. I am enjoying serving as Editor of JVER and this is due in large part to their assistance and support. I also want to thank the many reviewers who continue to serve JVER . Prompt, quality reviews are critical to the quality of JVER and the reviewers have served JVER and AVERA well.

Volume 28 Issue 2 contains four articles that are very diverse, yet are very important to the research mission in career and technical education. The first article by Alberto Arenas, "School-Based Enterprises and Environmental Sustainability," uses an educational framework of environmental sustainability to examine the production process and the final products and services delivered by School-Based Enterprises (SBEs). Existing literature in the area of SBEs extols their impact in the form of improving learning; however, research has been slow to address the importance of promoting ecological awareness through vocational, career and technical education. This article discusses the need to "green" SBEs in order to raise students' and teachers' consciousness about the importance of environmental stewardship, and it also explores key limitations faced by SBEs that attempt to follow such a framework. This environmental educational framework is used to analyze qualitatively the actual practices of SBEs in two public secondary schools in Colombia, South America.

Ernest Brewer and Jama McMahan examined job stress and burnout among industrial and technical teacher educators. Participants perceived that factors other than demographic characteristics explain a large amount of the variance in industrial and technical teacher educators' levels of job stress and burnout. Also, results indicate that industrial and technical teacher educators view stressors related to lack of organizational support as more severe than stressors related to job pressures. These findings have implications for addressing job stress in industrial and technical teacher education and could have implications for other teacher educators in career and technical education.

Farrell and Kotrlik found that traditional learning style instruments measure how students learn by interacting with their environments. Although these instruments are widely accepted, many are based on early theories and have questionable reliability and validity. The goal of this research was to furnish educators with a high quality, easily administered self-assessment tool to determine individual differences in strategical information processing styles, which are a measure of the strategies that individuals use to process information transmitted by the senses. Based on the theories of individual differences and the information processing paradigm, Farrell and Kotrlik hypothesized five different strategical information processing styles (SIPS): visuo-spatial, analytical, social, categorical, and verbal. An instrument was developed containing specific measurable descriptors for each of the five constructs. In this study, the empirical evidence verified only four SIPS: visuo-spatial, analytical, social, and categorical. Although the study did not confirm the verbal style, there is strong theoretical evidence that this style exists and further research is needed to develop and evaluate new indicator variables that will measure this construct. These individual strategies should prove to be useful assets in the dynamic workplace of the twenty-first century.

Chris Zirkle's article completes this issue by presenting a review and synthesis of the distance learning literature in career and technical education. This research synthesis reviews previous studies on distance education in CTE, organizing them into topical categories and highlights the important aspects of these studies. Zirkle states that research on distance education in career and technical education reflects many of the concerns voiced by Phipps and Merisotis (1999), i.e., the research has been focused on individual courses, not programs, and has not examined differences between traditional and distance learners. Zirkle indicates that innovative programming in the use of distance learning in career and technical education is warranted.

As indicated earlier, these articles are diverse and are important to the research mission in vocational, career and technical education. These articles certainly provide solid foundations for further research in the areas studied.

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