On the status of Job Empowerment Skills in the High School Vocational Curriculum for the Trainable Mentally-retarded Students in Iran

The main purpose of this research was to explore the status of job empowerment skills in the high school vocational curriculum for the trainable mentally-retarded male students in Iran. To this end, this study concerned the effects of curriculum elements (objective, content, time and evaluation) on the elements of job empowerment skills (general and social skills, self-management, economical self-sufficiency, and professional rehabilitation). The sampling frame of this field study included all the specialists of Education Organization for the Exceptional Students (N=45), all the curriculum planning experts in the high school vocational education (N=100), all the teachers working at high school vocational education in Qazvin Province (N=120), and all the employers (N=15). The sample of the study comprised 223 respondents selected using simple random sampling. Data was collected through two research instruments, that is, a 44-item questionnaire with a scale of 0 to 10 (constructed by the researcher) and an interview. Data was analyzed through both descriptive (tables, charts, frequency, cumulative percentage, variance and change coefficients) and inferential statistics (t-test, one way ANOVA, and LSD). The results of the study indicated that the two groups of education specialists and curriculum development experts contended that the curriculum maintained high efficiency to enhance the quintuple skills (general and social skills, self-management, economical self-sufficiency and professional rehabilitation) of the trainable mentally-retarded students in Iran in order to acquire job empowerment skills. The other two groups however maintained that it had a small capacity. Paying close attention to this difference in their stance and the point that teachers and employers are the administrators of the high school vocational education curriculum, it seems essential that the two groups of education specialists and curriculum development experts in Iran basically reconsider the current curriculum in order to help the trainable mentally-retarded students gain job empowerment skills.