Fragments of an economic habitus. Conceptions of economic phenomena in freshmen and seniors

Abstract

The article reports on parts of an empirical longitudinal study. Students oj engineering, business administration, medicine and psychology have been interviewed at the beginning and at the end of their education. The focus in the present article is on the students of business administration. Two oj the questions in the interview asked for the student's conceptions about the most prominent contemporary economic problem and the cause of famine in the underdeveloped countries.The results show that the students of business administration to a large extent seem to changeform an initiallyheld political, distributionoriented perspective on the two questions to a more depoliticized efficiencyperspective. This change means, in the case of the more general question about the most prominent economic problem that the initial emphasis on the uneven distribution of economic resources either in an international or in a national perspective in many cases was replaced by a stress on a more efficient utilization of resources or the necessity of more incentives for individual or collective initiatives. This tendency is not found among the students of medicine. In the second question the initially fragmented reasons for famine in terms of the relationship between developed and underdevelopedcountries decreased in frequency leading to a stress on unfavorable conditions for food production or the new Maltusian notion of the different rates of population growth and increase in food prodution.

Learning physiotherapy: students' ways of experiencing the patient encounter

“…In several phenomenographic studies, this is conducted by combining the qualitative analysis with quantitative aspects, e.g. the distribution of subjects over the categories on the different interview occasions is used as a way of describing the impact of education (Alexandersson, 1985;Dahlgren, 1989b) This is also the structure of the present study.…”

Undergraduate students’ knowledge outcomes and how these relate to their educational experiences: a longitudinal study of chemistry in two countries

“…Gaining a sense of how these accounts change over time is important in order to examine the impact that students' educational experiences have on their changing understanding of these structured bodies of knowledge. This was examined in the study looking at students accounts of sociology (Ashwin et al, 2014) and has been undertaken into students' accounts of particular concepts (for example see Dahlgren, 1989;Trumper, 1998), research into students' epistemological development (for example see Baxter Magolda, 1992Magolda, , 2004, research into students' conceptions of learning (for example van Rossum & Hamer, 2010) and research into students' learning patterns (for example see Donche et al, 2010;Neilsen, 2013;Richardson, 2013).…”

Mapping prior knowledge: A framework for discussion among researchers

“…In the Wagemans and Dochy study (1991 a), experiential learning was interpreted as that part of the prior knowledge that was not formally recorded but is acquired through life, work, and study. Aspects of experiential knowledge are evidenced in the work on naive conceptions (e.g., Eylon & Linn, 1988), alternative frameworks (e.g., Duit, 1987) and conceptual change (e.g., Dahlgren, 1989;Johansson, Marton, & Svensson, 1985;Marton, 1988;Roth & Anderson, 1988). Certainly, we know that all other forms of prior knowledge can be partly experiential, a factor that makes its direct representation in any conceptual map of prior knowledge impractical.…”