Selected research publications

Workplace-based learning
Career education and pathways
Alternative education

Workplace-based learning and assessment

  • Knowing Practice: Vocational Thresholds for Carpenters, GPs and Engineering Technicians

    Karen Vaughan, Linda Bonne & Jan Eyre
    What kinds of experiences propel learners across a 'vocational threshold' to new levels of capability?

  • Mate, You Should Know This! Re-negotiating Practice After a Critical Incident in Assessment

    Karen Vaughan, Andrew Kear & Heath MacKenzie
    A perfect storm for a training advisor’s site visit leads to changes in a community of practice.

  • The Role of Apprenticeship in the Cultivation of Soft Skills and Dispositions

    Karen Vaughan
    Apprenticeship is uniquely positioned to foster soft skills and give employers a valuable education role.

  • A Transformational System for On-Job Assessment in the Building and Construction Industries

    Karen Vaughan, Ben Gardiner & Jan Eyre
    A system that ensures assessors and trainers can focus on what really matters in apprentices' learning.

  • Taking Charge of Your Apprenticeship

    Andrew Kear, Karen Vaughan & Ben Gardiner
    A team approach to apprenticeship, with apprentice, trainer, assessor and moderator.

  • A Guide to Good Practice in ITO Systems to Assess On-Job Learning

    Karen Vaughan & Marie Cameron
    Four principles and examples for designing a system that aligns what to learn with how to assess it on-the-job. 

  • How Learning Happens at Work

    Karen Vaughan, Paul O'Neil & Marie Cameron
    A framework mapping the right conditions, strategies and activities for workplace-based learning.

  • Training for a Reflective Workforce: Transfer of Learning for Support Worker Apprentices

    Karen Vaughan and Jo McDonald
    A study of how apprentices can transfer learning - apply what they learn to more complex situations.

Youth pathways and career education

  • Engineering e2e (Education to Employment)

    Karen Vaughan
    How systems across economy, workforce development and career education could be integrated to develop engineers.

  • Subject Choice for the Future of Work

    Rose Hipkins & Karen Vaughan
    How do schools provide the right options, and how do students choose subjects, for the future of work?

  • Learning to Fly: Career Management Competencies

    Karen Vaughan & Lorraine Spiller
    Career management competencies have the potential to transform school career education.

  • Career Education Networks and Communities of Practice

    Karen Vaughan & Paul O'Neil
    School careers advisors need different relationships, information channels and skills.

  • Pathways, Labour Market Experiences and Learning at Work: Beyond the Age of 26

    The Competent Learners study followed a cohort of young New Zealanders from early childhood, through school and into adulthood. 

  • Young People Producing Careers and Identities

    Karen Vaughan, Josie Roberts & Ben Gardiner
    Follows 120 young people over a 5-year period since leaving school, analysing the four main ways they made sense of their pathways. 

  • The Pathways Framework meets Consumer Culture: Young People, Careers, and Commitment

    Karen Vaughan
    We need a more complex understanding of the imperatives young people face in a tertiary education system that intensifies particular kinds of choices.

Alternative education

  • Daring to be Different: The Rise and Fall of Auckland Metropolitan College

    Karen Vaughan
    'Metro', the only state-funded alternative high school in New Zealand, was closed after eight critical ERO reports, sparking questions about its role and schooling today.

  • Beyond the Age of Aquarius

    Karen Vaughan
    This book discusses alternative schools and initiatives from the 1960s, 1970s, and contemporary times, and how they have been reinvented as individual pathways.

  • Total Eclipse of the Heart: Doing Ethnographic Research

    Karen Vaughan
    This academic methodology paper explores disturbing aspects of research on the only state-funded alternative secondary school in New Zealand.

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