By: Catalina D’Achiardi-Ressler, Ph.D., Vice President of Research

Ensuring that each of our assessments and products is research-based has always been the priority at Kuder, Inc. In recent years most of the research focused around the assessments and making sure that they were psychometrically sound (i.e., valid and reliable). However, now that we have had the opportunity to ensure the quality of all three assessments, our team started to work on other exciting research endeavors that are practical to educators, students, and our users in general.

The idea for the research study described in this article emerged from the issues that we see over and over being discussed in the educational arena regarding career planning such as: the impact of career tools and career planning on students’ school performance; students’ ability to make timely career decisions; and, students making a satisfactory transition into higher education. Even though some have studied these issues in isolation, to this day there appears to be little evidence to support the impact that career exploration products have on the latter issues. Therefore, in this study, we sought to examine the impact that the Kuder Career Planning System (KCPS) has on each of these issues for students at two technical colleges, in two different demographic areas in the state of South Carolina.

This study used a true experimental control group design (i.e., we randomly selected students who have used the system and compared them to another randomly selected group of students who have not used the system). Students in the two participating technical colleges were randomly selected from either Kuder, Inc.’s database or the school’s database systems.

Data from 1,989 students was collected for the purpose of this research study. All students are from two mid-size technical colleges in the state of South Carolina (half of the sample belonged to one of the technical colleges and half of them to the other). Approximately half of them (993) were randomly selected from the Kuder, Inc database system and half of them (996) were randomly selected from the colleges’ databases. The former are all users of the KCPS and the latter are non-users of the system. All information was retrieved without identifying information to protect the participants’ identity and keep all individual records confidential.

Here is the summary of the three main findings:

What did we learn about the impact on school performance?
Students in the KCPS user group had significantly higher school performance scores than those students in the non-KCPS user group. More specifically, descriptive statistics suggested that nearly 20% of KCPS users demonstrated an increase in school performance since they started using the system.

What did we learn about the frequency and congruency of career choices?
Through data analyses we found that KCPS users changed their major, on average, approximately two times less than non-KCPS users. Moreover, over half of the KCPS user group had never changed their major compared to the non-KCPS user group where almost half of them had changed their major one or more times. Finally, congruence indices (i.e. similarities) between college major choice and the Kuder Career Search with Person Match (interest assessment) and congruence indices between college major choice and the Kuder Skills Assessment (skills assessment) were calculated. These congruence indices suggested that students selected college majors that are highly congruent with their interest assessment and moderately congruent with their skills assessment.

What did we learn about these students’ transition from high school to the technical colleges?
Data from KCPS-users who started using the system when they were in high school was examined to answer this question. We found that approximately 90% of students who used the system during their high school years transitioned into the technical college.

Summary
There is strong evidence to suggest that the KCPS benefits students in three main ways: 1) It helps them perform better in school; 2) it helps them make faster and more accurate career choices that are congruent with characteristics about themselves; and, 3) it helps them transition at a higher rate from high school to higher education. This is just the beginning of evidence on the impact that the use of the KCPS has on this particular population. We are currently conducting other similar studies and look forward to sharing more about these with our users in the future.

For questions or more specific details about this research study, please contact Dr. D’Achiardi-Ressler at catadn@kuder.com.

NCDA Presentation
This study will be presented during the Annual National Career Development Association Convention on Thursday, July 10, 2008 during the panel presentation, “Investigating the Academic and Economic Impact of Career Exploration on Student Retention, Performance, and Transition”. Visit www.ncda.org for more information.

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