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Introduction
For years, school-enterprise collaboration has stood as a cornerstone of vocational education in various nations. Notably, in China, this partnership has gained legislative momentum. The recently promulgated Vocational Education Law explicitly mandates the prioritization and implementation of school-enterprise cooperation within vocational education (SCoPRC, 2022a). Further reinforcing this emphasis, in 2022, the “Opinions on Deepening Reform of Modern Vocational Education System Construction” posited that the key to progressing the modern vocational education reform lies in maintaining adherence to school-enterprise cooperation (SCoPRC, 2022b).
Given the significance of school-enterprise cooperation, it has been a critical focal point in academic research on vocational education. However, research in China on school-enterprise cooperation primarily focuses on policy design, incentive structures, implementation strategies, and safeguarding mechanisms, with considerably less emphasis on evaluating the status of this cooperation. For the holistic advancement and promotion of school-enterprise collaboration, it’s imperative to fathom their real-time status. To achieve such an understanding, a robust evaluation framework is indispensable.
Among the plethora of initiatives tailored to nurture school-enterprise cooperation, internships stand out as the most direct and common practice. Through internships, schools and employers can mutually benefit from shared resources. Empirical evidence underscores the pivotal role of internships in career orientation (Rauner, 2006). They not only augment students’ work productivity but also facilitate more effective hiring decisions for employers (Yang and Tian, 2014).
In this study, we spotlight vocational education internships as a representative example of school-enterprise cooperation. Aiming to enrich the research on the evaluation of such cooperation in China, on one side, we address the research problem of “how vocational students evaluate vocational education internships”. We endeavor to answer the specific sub-questions of “what aspects of the internship should be evaluated” and “what tools should be employed for evaluation” by devising a vocational education internships evaluation scale specifically for vocational students. On the other side, we apply this scale to support systematic evaluation of students’ experiences in internships. Based on the empirical results derived from our investigation, we put forth recommendations to refine and advance vocational education internships in China.
Literature review
Internship in vocational education
Multiple studies have shown the significant influence of internships. These studies have examined different facets, such as the association between internship experience and employee retention (Yang and Tian,...