A study of a causal model construction for improving career guidance in upper secondary schools

The current career guidance in upper secondary schools seemed to have been carried out from the standpoint of stressing students’ academic performance. How-ever, to properly decide students’ future courses, it is believed important to consider their interests and motivation, which are parts of the students’ scholastic aptitude. In the following study we tried to specify the constructs affecting a style in recent career guidance, and to find a more useful way for improvement. 2616 teachers in charge of career guidance in upper secondary schools answered the questionnaire sent to them by mail. The data were analyzed using covariance structure analysis, and the relations between observed variables and latent variables were examined. Beforehand, two models of career guidance were constructed : the first one was a guidance emphasizing students’ scholastic aptitude ; and the second one was a guidance mainly stressing academic performance. It was shown that, according to our models, the Goodness of Fit Index resulting from the data was satisfactorily high.