Nurses who had just completed their training in Scotland were interviewed with regard to their experiences on placements. The nurses had either completed a traditional training course or came from the first cohort of the Project 2000 diploma level course. The interviews focused on the way in which the student nurses had learned in their practice placements. The results suggest that the placement is a complex social and cognitive experience in which there are elements of situated learning. Acceptance into the community of practice is important but this can be separated, conceptually at least, into a social acceptance which might be extended to any student and a professional acceptance which relies on the display of appropriate competence. The nurses described the way in which their mentors had interacted with them in terms which suggested that cognitive apprenticeship strategies had been used to further their learning in practice. It is concluded that, in view of the central importance of the placement for training nurses, explicit use of mentoring techniques derived from situated learning and cognitive apprenticeship might be beneficial.

In this paper the views of student nurses taking Project 2000 at a Scottish College of Nursing are reported. A random sample of 19 students were interviewed. The interviews focused on the relationship between the college course and the students' experiences on placement. The majority had difficulty in relating the college course to their practice, except when it came to very specific parts of the programme, for example basic medical procedures. Only a minority could integrate the broader aspects of the course to their practice, largely because there was such a long period of time between studying a topic in college and the related placement. It is tempting to see the results as supporting the situated cognition hypothesis that theory loses meaning out of context, and it is evident, even from this limited study, that the success of Project 2000, with its emphasis on the 'knowledgeable doer', could depend, to a great extent, on the careful phasing of college coursework and placement to enable students to integrate theory and practice more effectively.

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