Syntheses of Vocational Research in Teaching and Learning using Meta - Analysis

Abstract

The purposes of this study were, first, to study characteristic of vocational education research using Meta analysis, second, to synthesize the research using Meta analysis by estimating the effect size and correlation coefficient from each research and, third, to explain the differences of the classified effect size according to the characteristic of vocational education research in various factors namely; the instructor, the lesson content, the teaching media, the teaching method, the students themselves as well as the academic achievement. The synthesized experimental researches on vocational education which served as study population obtained from research agencies or educational institutions that has conducted and published since 1997 to 2009. The total research works used in this study were 272 volumes. The following conclusions may be drawn: 1) The highest influential factor is the lesson content - teaching media with an average effect size of 2.506, followed by the lesson content, the teaching media, the lesson content – teaching method, the teaching media-teaching method, the teaching media-the students themselves, and the teaching method with an average effect size of 2.397, 2.085, 1.983, 1.892, 1.774, and 1.313, respectively. Finally, the lowest influential factor was the students themselves with an average effect size of 1.124 (Currently, there is no research on the influential factor of the instructor available.) 2) The comparison of different of an average effect size classified by research characteristics was conducted and found that the difference showed statistical significance at the .05 level that included research funding, the main objectives, learning and teaching factors, type of hypothesis, number of independent variables, how to select study population, size of the study population, tools used in this study, validation of tool by the experts, reliability of the test form, and statistical methods used to analyze the data. 3) The overall quality of the synthesized research is good. Considering by item, it was found that nine of them had very good quality; seven items had good quality, nine items had fair quality, and the others five had a relatively low quality.