For the students of Grade 9 to Grade 12, whether learning knowledge, training of thinking skills or practicing, the most important thing for them is to realize that they should never take memorizing and understanding the knowledge as the final goal; instead, they should focus on the hands-on practice. As whatever the future is, self-employed or serve an organization, the most important ability is the ability to solve practical and complex problems. As the knowledge gets more skilled, OCAmerica HS considers more about the needs of the students’ future development. Based on their interests and specialties, OCAmerica HS has designed carefully the interest expansion system---PBL Academy System (made up of PBL School of Arts, PBL School of Sciences and PBL School of Business). With this system, the students can participate in projects in groups under their tutors ‘guidance, designing solutions to the specific topics or issues, and on the basis of autonomous learning, they can deepen their understanding and application of the knowledge, and find out their weaknesses and encourage them to do in-depth learning.
Under the concept of career development as the main line, the students' independent development strategies designed by OCAmerica HS can be shown as follows:
Support the cultivation of innovative talents with the big data system
Support the cultivation of innovative talents with the big data system. The related R&D institutions of OCAmerica HS has invested a lot of manpower and material resources including the nine modules such as school warning, psychological warning and career decision-making, covering dozens of evaluation tools and dimensions such as subjects potential evaluation, learning style, learning strategy, professional interest, personality, psychological evaluation, and self-control tools and dimensions, hundreds of evaluation indicators, to do a comprehensive data collection and analysis, interpret the learners’behaviors by using the known models and methods, provide adaptive feedback, then find out the key to the internal learning potential and motivations, and set up the target and highlight the advantages, and gradually establish personalized strategies and path of promotion for the internationalized innovation talents.
Individualized guidance system
Through the correlation analysis of the variables that may affect the learners’ knowledge, skills and habits such as courses they learn, learning resources, teaching methods, social and emotional/physical conditions, academic and comprehensive development goals, with complementary research in metacognition, gradually demonstrate the effectiveness of each factor, and build modeling system to analyze the learners’ diversified trends of future development in academic and non-academic fields. And through the trinity of tutorial system management (that is, the academic advisor, career planner and overseas study tutor), give timely and targeted guidance and intervention, then eventually establish a personalized guidance system.
Future academic planning
Through the establishment of career exploration laboratory, the students can experience their dreamed careers. After the students have reserved different project experience/study of different directions, a professional team will guide them, videotape the experiencing process, and then conduct psychological, behavioral analysis and evaluations and give them feedbacks.
The following cases will illustrate this process in details:
Student A was enrolled in OCAmerica HS after his graduation from Grade 9, and now he is faced with the choice of college majors and future career directions. He took part in a career experience camp during the summer vacation, and then he conducted a self-exploration and career exploration, which enabled him to have a preliminary understanding of the major classification and career system in the universities. He had an assessment for himself after being enrolled, which enabled him to have an in-depth understanding of his academic abilities, professional interest, potentials, personalities, and values, and then he decided that Life Sciences should be one of the most important directions of his future. Then Student A reserved and participated in 2 professional projects and 3 career experience projects in the Life Sciences Career Exploration Laboratory. During this process, the subject teacher gave a preliminary assessment about his career potentials, and also gave him suggestions on academic planning in the future.
