No abstract

Recent research shows that, as students interpret the demands of the assessment tasks, they vary their approaches to learning in order to cope with the assessment tasks. Three research questions are central in the present paper: (1) Do students who participate in a constructivist learning environment change their perception of assessment demands towards more deep level demands? (2) Do students in a constructivist learning environment change their approaches to learning towards a more deep approach to learning? (3) Is there a relation between change in approaches to learning and change in the perceptions of the assessment demands? Students following the course 'Education and psychology' of the teacher training program at the University of Antwerp completed questionnaires during the first, the second and the final lesson of the course. One questionnaire measured their approaches to learning and the other their general perceptions of the assessment demands. The course 'Education and psychology' can be labelled as a 'constructivist learning environment' with congruent assessment methods. Results of the paired sampled t-tests indicated that students indeed do change their perceptions of assessment demands towards more deep level demands. However, the results also indicated that students did not change their approach to learning towards a more deep approach. On the contrary, students seem to develop more surface approaches to learning during the course. Correlation analyses indicated that only changes of perceptions of assessment demands towards less surface levels are significantly related to changes in approaches to learning, towards a more surface approach. Results of the stepwise multiple regression analyses indicated that students' approach to learning at the beginning of the course seems to have a higher impact on the

Clinical practice is an essential component of medical training, but not all internships yield the appropriate and expected learning results. We report on an exploratory study of the learning process during internship in undergraduate medical education. We hypothesised that learning experiences in clinical practice are determined by characteristics of the interns, characteristics of the training setting and the meaningful interactions between them. As the study focused on the perceptions and interpretations of both interns and their supervisors of interns' experiences in practical training, qualitative research methods were used for data collection and analysis. This consisted of student shadowing, complemented by informal and semistructured interviews with both interns and supervisors. Analysis revealed 5 components that constitute learning experiences in clinical internship. These components represent dynamics in the clinical environment that constantly require students to (re-)define and (re-)position themselves: the agenda of the internship (working versus learning); the attitude of the supervisor (evaluator versus coach); the culture of the training setting (work-orientated versus training-orientated); the intern's learning attitude (passive versus proactive), and the nature of the learning process (informal versus formal). The model of components and tensions offers a conceptual framework to analyse and understand students' learning during internship. It not only contributes to a grounded theoretical conceptualisation of clinical learning, but may also be used in efforts to improve the quality of learning during internship, as well as the level of support and supervision.

a department of Education, university of applied Sciences utrecht (nl), utrecht, the netherlands; b department of philosophy & religious Studies, university of utrecht (nl), utrecht, the netherlands; c department of training and Education Sciences, university of antwerp (BE), antwerp, Belgium Context of co-teachingIn many countries, co-teaching is seen as an instrumental and pedagogical model for handling diversity from which students with and without special educational needs can benefit (

In accordance with the literature, medical expertise was characterised by forward reasoning, whereas outside their area of expertise, the subjects switched over to backward reasoning. It is possible to assess processes of clinical reasoning using EMQs.