Students’ experiences of clinic‐based learning during a final year veterinary internship programme

This study investigated veterinary students’ experiences of clinic‐based learning (CBL) during a comprehensive final year internship programme. Open‐ended surveys (n = 93) were used to gather qualitative data about students’ conceptions of what is learned during CBL and their approaches to learning in clinics. Phenomenography was used for detailed analysis of the variation evident in students’ responses. Relationships between qualitative differences in students’ conceptions and approaches were then evaluated using quantitative statistical analysis. Links to achievement during final year were examined. Close associations were found between the quality of students’ experiences of CBL and achievement during the internship programme.     

‘Please remember we are not all brilliant’: undergraduates’ experiences of an elite,research‐intensive degree at a research‐intensive university

Undergraduate research experiences are being incorporated into degree programs with increasing frequency. However, there has been little study into their effectiveness in preparing students for research or into the learning gains that students realise from one or more research experiences. We surveyed science students in an elite, research‐based undergraduate degree program at a research‐intensive university. These students complete six research projects during their degree and we aimed to delineate factors that students perceive as leading to either good or bad experiences. Two factors stand out as contributing to a successful research experience: the supervisor, with students reporting both pedagogic and affective benefits of good supervision; and the feeling that they are doing authentic science. Surprisingly, given the research‐intensive nature of this degree, the learning gains students report relate to both an appreciation of what research is like and life skills, such as time management, rather than scientific thinking skills.     

Disciplinary and gender differences among higher education students in self‐regulated learning strategies

This study explores how university students representing diverse disciplines and gender differ in their self‐regulation in learning. The definition of self‐regulated learning (SRL) in the present study is based on Pintrich’s and Zimmerman’s theories of SRL and comprises motivational and learning strategies. The sample consisted of 1248 undergraduate students at several Finnish universities. The data were retrieved from the IQ Learn online self‐assessment and tutoring system. Female students scored moderately higher than male students on help‐seeking strategies, utility value and on performance anxiety. Among the diverse disciplines, minor mean differences emerged on all the sub‐dimensions of SRL, though no clear regularity on any discipline’s favour was perceived. However, male and female students of behavioural sciences and female students of sciences scored highest consistently, and the technology students, especially the male students, scored lowest. In the future, the relations between the students’ self‐regulation in learning and instructional approach should be studied further.     

Putting Sylvia in her place: history,geographical theory and the “New” Education

New Zealander Sylvia Ashton‐Warner, a teacher in remote rural Māori schools in the 1940s–1950s, became internationally renowned as a novelist and educational theorist. Earlier commentators portrayed her educational theory as in conflict with those of her time and place, but recent studies conceptualise them as enabled by it. While space/place has often been considered the preserve of the geographer and time that of the historian, Henri Lefebvre and others suggest that: “these issues need to be thought together rather than separately” and that macro‐, meso‐ and micro‐levels of analysis be engaged simultaneously. The author traces how conceptual, linguistic, sensory and intellectual resources of the global “New Education” movement extended into the tiny bush‐encircled Māori communities in which Sylvia taught and wrote in the 1940s–1950s and surfaced in her writing. The article zooms in and out between the “the immensity of the global” (the New Education, the Second World War) and “the intimately tiny” (her classroom and home). The “data” include Sylvia’s non‐fiction education texts and official documents of her time: school curricula, education policy documents, Ministerial and Inspectors’ reports. What Lefebvre terms a “Rhythm analysis” of Ashton‐Warner’s educational writing shows intermingled pulses of domestic life, routines of educational bureaucracy, cycles of nature, and cataclysms of world events. It is important for historians to study “the where rather than just the when with location and landscape central parts of the analysis”.