Welcome to Lahti in Finland and to the ECER99 Conference, in particular to the VETNET-AHRD Programme. About 75 papers have been accepted for presentation in VETNET-AHRD sessions. Following the VETNET chair’s initiative at the previous conference to provide proceedings for all members of the network, we are pleased to present to you now the second publication of VETNET Proceedings. This has been edited by the programme chair, Johanna Lasonen, IER, University of Jyväskylä, with the technical assistance of Marja-Liisa Mustonen and support from Sabine Manning, Research Forum WIFO Berlin, presently working at Jyväskylä. This year’s VETNET-AHRD Proceedings include 35 contributions involving 55 authors. Thanks to all those who have sent their papers to the Proceedings to be published.

The support given by the IER, University of Jyväskylä, in publishing the printed volume of the Proceedings is gratefully acknowledged. In addition to the printed volume we, for the first time, offer an electronic version of the VETNET-AHRD Proceedings. This has been facilitated by the web-site of Education-line, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds (http://www.leeds.ac.uk /educol). We should like to take this opportunity for expressing our sincere thanks to the Education-line team for their excellent services.

You may be interested to find out more about the organisations involved in this year’s proceedings. What do EERA, ECER, VETNET, AHRD, IER Jyväskylä and Education-line stand for? Below we have compiled brief information, with reference to more extended sources, in particular using the internet as a resource base.

Please find in the following Proceedings the keynote statement and the contributions arranged alphabetically according to the authors. We hope this publication will be useful for both actively participating in the ECER99 sessions and getting feedback from this event.

Johanna Lasonen & Sabine Manning

Jyväskylä, September 1999

EERA aims to foster the exchange of ideas amongst European researchers, promote collaboration in research, improve research quality and to be able to offer independent advice on educational research to European policy-makers, administrators and practitioners. The foundation of EERA was first considered at the European Conference, University of Twente, in 1992. Further meetings amongst representatives of the national educational research associations throughout Europe led to its eventual foundation in Strasbourg in June 1994.

Membership is open to national associations of educational research, specialised European educational research associations, institutes for research in education, and to individual researchers. For more information see http://www.eera.ac.uk/.

ECER is the annual conference organised by EERA to provide a European forum of discourse about the latest research findings on education in Europe and worldwide. Last year’s conference took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia – full information is available on the server of Education-line: http://www.leeds.ac.uk /educol/ecer98.htm.

This year, EERA will be holding its annual conference at the Cultural Centre of Lahti, Finland: the Adult Education Centre, the Fellmanni Institute and the City Library, 22-25 September 1999. The local organisers are the Finnish Society of Educational Research and the University of Helsinki, Centre for Continuing Education. The conference aims to foster mutual work and communication amongst researchers in Europe and to encourage dialogue between researchers and those involved in educational decision-making in both policy and practice fields. Pre-conference information has been supplied by EERA: http://www.eera.ac.uk/ecer99/index.html.

VETNET is one of the EERA’s networks of researchers (network 2). It was created in 1994, at the University of Twente, as a multi-disciplinary platform for exchanging research results in the field of vocational education, corporate training and development, professional education and adult education. Its scope is broadly aimed at the relationship between education and training on the one hand, and the world of work on the other hand. The activities of VETNET have been geared

• to organise the ECER as for the domain of the network (designing the programme, discuss papers, organise panels, stimulate joint publications, etc.);

• to review the national research networks in the field of VET;

• to link up with other international platforms (AHRD; AERA; European Commission, CEDEFOP).

An electronic newsletter called "Updating VET Research" was set up in 1998, with a conceptual design provided by the Research Forum WIFO Berlin. The Newsletter covers seven major topics: News from VETNET, Focus on research programs, Issues of networks and partnerships, Highlights of conferences, Towards a profession, Access to resources, and Preview of events. It has a ‘rolling’ pattern of continuing information (without individual issues or time schedule).

The VETNET homepage including the newsletter have been made available on a server hosted by the Bank Academy Frankfurt: http://www.bankakademie.de/vetnet/

The Academy of Human Resource Development was formed to encourage systematic study of human resource development theories, processes, and practices, to disseminate information about HRD, to encourage the application of HRD research findings, and to provide opportunities for social interaction among individuals with scholarly and professional interests in HRD from multiple disciplines and from across the globe. The AHRD web site offers detailed information about events and publications: http://www.ahrd.org/

While the AHRD is based in the United States, several coordinators are active in other parts of the world including Europe (Jan N. Streumer, University of Twente, email: streumer@edte.utwente.nl).

The Institute, established in 1968, is a centre for educational research and evaluation in Finland. The IER's strongest area is national and international assessment and evaluation of education. On the international level the IER collaborates most extensively with the IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement), the OECD and the EU. The IER homepage (http://www.jyu.fi/ktl/ index2.html) includes information on European research projects coordinated by the Institute.

Education-line is developing a live collection of documents on the Internet. It has been established so that researchers, practitioners and policy makers from the worlds of education and training can

• present their work at early stages, for immediate review by colleagues world-wide;
• store important documents for archiving;
• publish specialised or small scale texts to the widest possible audience;
• find reports and papers - in full - relevant to their own interests, using the sophisticated search tools of the British Education Index;
• contribute to debates about the work through on-line commentary;
• see the latest reports, as they appear, on a daily basis.

Education-line is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as part of the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib). This is the web address of Education-line: http://www.leeds.ac.uk /educol/

"Document Number" refers to the unique Education-line number.
Click on the number to go direct to the hypertext version of the paper. Use your back button or a right mouse click to return to this page.