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352: INCREASING STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION FOR OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH CURRICULUM IN VOCATIONAL TRAINING

Occupational safety and health (OSH) training has become a common practice in the context of vocational education as a way to introduce preventive behaviours to protect students against accidents and injuries once they enter into the labour force. In a parallel way, companies are obliged to identify their risks and address them through providing their employees with appropriate knowledge and equipment. Despite efforts, still high numbers of young workers suffer from risks at work, this meaning that OSH training needs to be re-thought, especially among youngsters. This communication will deal on ways to improve OSH training in the context of vocational education, which is compulsory in Spain, by increasing students’ motivation towards these contents.

Scientific evidence shows that content-based training has a quite limited impact on attitude and behaviour change and a low effect on students’ motivation. However, it is the most used methodology for teaching at school due to its easy application to large-groups class. What refers to OHS training, content assimilation is a necessary condition but clearly insufficient to guarantee that workers perform the appropriate behaviours to protect them against labour risks.

To this respect, other methodological approaches with a more experiential basis are needed not only because they help students to learn how to display certain behaviours but also because they increase students’ motivation on learning and performing them afterwards. To this behaviour training by-doing, the need to provide students with skills (for instance, assertive communication) to help them performing the appropriate behaviour against social influence trying to persuade them not to carry it out should be also considered.

This communication stems from the assumption that, before introducing active methodologies in the classroom, it is necessary to know teachers’ perspectives about their effectiveness taking into account the characteristics of the students they have, and to identify what kind of support they would need in order to implement them, something that will be done by interviewing teachers in vocational education who are taking care of OHS training. The results obtained are expected to contribute to enhance OHS training in vocational education.

Author(s):

Mònica González-Carrasco    
University of Girona
Spain

Esperança Villar    
University of Girona
Spain

Núria Mancebo    
University of Girona
Spain