Understanding how teaching interest and motivation develop during the academic STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) study program is essential to design effective interventions to increase teacher recruitment. This article describes a new approach to study STEM teachers' career choice processes. The retrospective method, which…

Student counselors and tutors guide students' choices of study profiles (subjects) within Dutch secondary education. This study addressed three research questions: (1) According to counselors and tutors, what factors should inform students' study profile choices? (2) Into what types can the views of counselors and tutors be classified? (3)…

In many countries, high-stakes tests play an important role in allocating students to prestigious tracks and schools in secondary education or to prestigious programs and colleges in tertiary education. It is not clear what happens if the cutoff points in these tests are systematically lowered. Will this affect subsequent educational careers? This…

Research on beginning student teachers' motivations for becoming teachers has shown that they want to contribute to the lives of their students and to society; however, few of these studies have addressed beginning student teachers' views on what education is for in relation to the development of both their future students and society. To examine…

This study validates Shane et al.'s Entrepreneurial Career Motives Scale across nations. A total sample of 948 undergraduate and postgraduate students from five nations (China = 229, Hong Kong = 213, Holland = 136, United States = 155, and Ghana = 215) were recruited to complete a survey designed to measure their entrepreneurial motives and other…

Career shocks can significantly impact individuals' career development. We propose that how a career shock affects career development depends on how people appraise it. Specifically, our Career Shock Coping (CSC) model proposes that, dependent on personal characteristics, individuals differ in the extent to which they appraise career shocks as…

This study focuses on student teachers who are on the threshold of entering the teaching profession. The aim of this study is to examine their motivations for becoming teachers, their educational ideals and the meaningful experiences inside and outside teacher education that influenced their educational ideals. To examine these, we conducted a…

Important adolescents' career-related decisions might be influenced by their beliefs about malleability of intelligence and learning (mindset). We combined quantitative and qualitative data to provide in-depth insights in the beliefs that 13- and 14-year olds hold about learning and intelligence, the factors influencing these beliefs, and the…

This paper examines how students' employability develops during undergraduate studies at a Dutch liberal arts college compared to a conventional bachelor's programme in law at the same university. Drawing on the graduate capital model, the study focuses on six skills that enhance employability: creativity, lifelong learning, career decidedness,…

The goal of this case study was to examine how a group of young children in a historically marginalized neighborhood in the northern part of the Netherlands perceived their engagement in an out-of-school, STEM community-based program aiming to enhance young children's interest and self-identification with science. We collected data through…

Sex and gender are important determinants of healthcare that need to be taken into account for medical teaching. Education is more effective if tailored to students' subjectively-perceived needs and connected to their prior knowledge and opinions. This study explored first-year medical students thoughts about sex and gender differences in general…

Efforts to create career learning environments which provide students with work experience, skills for making choices and career guidance dialogues, appear to stagnate in vocational education and training (VET) institutions in the Netherlands. In this case study we explore how teachers and their managers make sense of career guidance. We found…

Secondary school students in the Netherlands already face future-oriented decisions about their educational careers, which are expected to be informed by their interests in specific vocations or occupations. However, vocational interest assessment tools generally do not account for the possibility that students are interested in multiple…

International policy and practice reviews support policy development by learning what works, in what contexts, and why. They also provide the opportunity to consider how that learning might be effectively translated to the English context. Three years after the publication of the 2017 Careers Strategy (ED612489) (Department for Education, 2017),…

From a developmental perspective, gifted girls could benefit from the life experience shared by gifted women about what influenced them to make life choices. This study focuses on Dutch gifted women to explore what were facilitating or hindering factors in making those decisions in education, personal life, and career. Interviews with 10…