ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1652869
The Impact of Internship Experience and Career Aspirations on the Academic Performance of Railway Electrical Automation Students in China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Faculty of Education and Liberal Arts, INTI International University, Nilai, Malaysia
- 2School of Education and Management, Xuancheng Vocational and Technical College, Xuancheng, China
- 3Xi'an Traffic Engineering Institute, Xi'an, China
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This study examined the structural mechanisms through which internship experience and career aspirations influence academic performance among railway electrical automation students in China, grounded in Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT). Utilizing stratified multi-stage sampling (N=403) and quantitative analyses (regression, mediation tests), three key findings emerged: (1) High-quality internships (duration ≥6 months, task relevance, technical depth) directly enhance academic performance (β=0.218, p<0.001), validating the theory-practice integration pathway; (2) Career aspirations, particularly realism (β = 0.107, p = 0.032), independently predict GPA, while clarity of goals shows a non-significant negative trend (β = -0.086, p = 0.096). Synergistic effects were observed in deep internships; (3) Career aspirations mediate 34.8% of internship effects (95% CI [0.078, 0.146]), revealing an indirect "internship→goal→academic" pathway. The study advances SCCT's dynamic "experience-goal" framework and proposes policy strategies for optimizing China's industry-education integration, including extended internships and regional resource rebalancing. Limitations include cross-sectional design and regional sample bias, necessitating longitudinal validation.
Keywords: internship experience, Career aspirations, academic performance, Education quality, youth empowerment
Received: 24 Jun 2025; Accepted: 29 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Haojie, Taddese, Yingying and Jiangping. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Esayas Teshome Taddese, eteshome75@gmail.com
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