CCL Home > Research Activities > Funded Research
September 2008
Executive Summary (PDF 350 KB)
Full Report (PDF 974 MB)
Career indecision is among the most researched topics in vocational counselling. Developing and empirically testing strategies to enhance career decision-making skill is less prevalent. This is unfortunate as many studies reveal benefits of systematically and deliberately approaching career decisions. Although understanding and minimizing difficulties that individuals bring to the career decision-making process is important, developing strategies to support all decision-makers during decision-making is equally valuable. Recent empirical studies find that career indecision can be reduced if interventions support the career decision-making process.
Newer vocational counselling models focus on the decision-making process: how individuals reach decisions, how better decisions can be made, and how individuals can be helped to make good decisions. Shifting attention to the decision-making process necessitates using different theories that fall in the general category of decision theories that seek to explain how decisions are made, how they should be made, and ways to support the decision-making.
Normative decision models outline how decisions should be made and advocate using rational steps or procedures. Descriptive decision models describe human decision-making behaviour in real life settings and seek to explain how various factors influence decision-making behaviour. Prescriptive decision models are designs for helping individuals make good decisions and training people to enhance their decision-making skills.
Normative models have increasingly been criticized as too restrictive, too mathematical, too rational, uni-dimensional, and ultimately unable to account for the complex and diverse factors that influence people in making career decisions. In this context, Gati and Asher (2001) developed a 3- stage model called the PIC model: pre-screen, in-depth explore, and choose. According to the PIC model, specific decision-making skills vary as a function of different tasks that individuals must complete in each stage of the decision-making process.
Our prescriptive decision making model builds on Gati and Asher’s PIC model and adopts Miller and Byrnes’ (2001) desideratum, namely, that the model “[provide] guideposts to the kinds of skills that should be developing, as well as clues regarding ways to intervene, if these skills are found not to be developing as they should” (p. 677). As well, we experimentally varied the presence of (a) instructional objectives and (b) reflection exercises to test whether these could further support improvement in knowledge and skill related to career decision making.
The instructional design that all participants received applied several design features (lists, tables, and templates) to promote and guide information processing as participants studied a series of web-pages that presented instructions and links to online career resources, and a workbook that presented lists, tables, and templates to guide individuals to record information in organized and logically structured ways.
To rigorously explore the effects of these instructional supports, we designed a 2 x 2 true experiment. One variable – instructional objectives – was incorporated in the online component of our prescriptive career curriculum. The second variable – integrated reflection exercises – was operationalized in the workbook associated with our prescriptive curriculum on career decision making (see Method section).
Because motivational variables can moderate how learners engage with information and the outcomes of learning, we also investigated the potential moderating role of three motivational factors that are theorized to affect comprehension, learning, and self-regulation of learning. The first motivational variable was goal orientation. It concerns reasons for pursuing particular goals plus standards for evaluating progress toward those goals. The second motivational variable was epistemological beliefs: views learners hold about what knowledge consists of, how knowledge is validated, and how it is created and changes. The third motivational variable was need for cognition: a person’s preference for tasks that involve actively searching for information and effortful thinking.
Career indecision is among the most researched topics in vocational counselling. Developing and empirically testing strategies to enhance career decision-making skill is less prevalent. This is unfortunate as many studies reveal benefits of systematically
L’indécision en matière de choix de carrière figure parmi les sujets les plus étudiés en orientation professionnelle. La recherche sur le développement de stratégies en vue d’améliorer les compétences en choix de carrière et sur les tests empiriques découlant