Students' Preferred Shs Program and their National Career Assessment Examination Results

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Career assessment is a systematic approach to collect information about learners' aptitudes. The Philippines has utilized this assessment through the National Career Assessment Examination (NCAE) among Grade 9 students annually wherein results serve as guide for admission in a Senior High School (SHS) program. Results from subtests or entire NCAE were considered to have positive high correlation with the academic performance of students (Tan & Balasico, 2018). DepEd Order 55, s. 2016 delineated the use of the result and possible intervention related to career choice. The simple interrelatedness of subtest scores with other scores could not suffice to identify needed remediation. It is in this regard that this study aims to determine whether the learners perform better on their preferred track and strand than on other programs.

METHODS

A sample of 131 Grade 10 students of San Juan National High School, Libmanan, Camarines Sur were able to use the early registration form for SHS to get their preferred program and the result of their NCAE 2017 to get the scores in each area. A simple random sampling technique was used. The t-test for means was used to determine the significant difference between percentile rank of preferred tracks against the average of the percentile ranks of non-preferred tracks.

RESULTS

The top 2 first choices are Academic-GAS (44%) and TVL (35%) while top among second choice is TVL with 43 (33%) and 22 out of 131 have no second choice. The P-values of t-test between the first choice percentile rank and the average of non-first choice percentile ranks were interpreted to have no significant difference for ABM, GAS, STEM and TVL, and have strong significant difference for HUMSS with higher non-first choice percentile ranks.

DISCUSSION

STheir choices of SHS programs follow the national trends. The results also indicate that their aptitudes in their chosen program are almost the same with other programs. The school administration may consider a career guidance program to assist the learners in decision-making. Other researchers may extend study on the areas of occupational interest and second choice of the learners.