Learner Career Research Articles

Applying the master adaptive learner framework to just‐in‐time training of procedures

AbstractBackgroundJust‐in‐time training (JITT) occurs in the clinical context when learners need immediate guidance for procedures due to a lack of proficiency or the need for knowledge refreshment. The master adaptive learner (MAL) framework presents a comprehensive model of transforming learners into adaptive experts, proficient not only in their current tasks but also in the ongoing development of lifelong skills. With the evolving landscape of procedural competence in emergency medicine (EM), trainees must develop the capacity to acquire and master new techniques consistently. This concept paper will discuss using JITT to support the development of MALs in the emergency department.MethodsIn May 2023, an expert panel from the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) Medical Educator's Boot Camp delivered a comprehensive half‐day preconference session entitled “Be the Best Teacher” at the society's annual meeting. A subgroup within this panel focused on applying the MAL framework to JITT. This subgroup collaboratively developed a practical guide that underwent iterative review and refinement.ResultsThe MAL‐JITT framework integrates the learner's past experiences with the educator's proficiency, allowing the educational experience to address the unique requirements of each case. We outline a structured five‐step process for applying JITT, utilizing the lumbar puncture procedure as an example of integrating the MAL stages of planning, learning, assessing, and adjusting. This innovative approach facilitates prompt procedural competence and cultivates a positive learning environment that fosters acquiring adaptable learning skills with enduring benefits throughout the learner's career trajectory.ConclusionsJITT for procedures holds the potential to cultivate a dynamic learning environment conducive to nurturing the development of MALs in EM.

Linear Predictors of Perceived Graduate Employability among South Africa’s Rural Universities’ Learners during the Covid-19 Pandemic

After the outbreak of Covid-19, universities in South Africa adopted blended learning and learning continued online. The outbreak of Covid-19 brought to light inherent problems that South African rural universities are facing in the utilisation of educational technologies. These problems include inadequate online support technologies, inadequate electricity supply and poor educator and learner technological skills. Resultantly, questions have been raised on rural university graduates’ employability prospects and how these can be enhanced. This study provides evidence revealing that learner career ambition can be used as an intervention mechanism to enhance graduate employability among rural university learners. This study sought to determine whether online teaching and learning predict perceived graduate employability among rural university learners in South Africa. In addition, the study investigated whether learner career ambition moderates the relationship between online teaching and learning and perceived graduate employability. Quantitative data was gathered from 150 rural university undergraduate learners. Random sampling was used to select them. A survey approach was used to gather primary data and the research instrument was a self-administered questionnaire. Simple linear regression, and hierarchical regression analyses were performed. Results reveal that online teaching and learning predict perceived graduate employability, and learner career ambition negatively moderates the relationship between online teaching and learning. The study recommends that more research is needed to shed light on how ambition can be used to enhance graduate employability especially in online teaching and learning environments marred by poor information and communication technology infrastructure.

Navigating the Infinite Number of Educational Resources: The Development of a Publicly Available Surgical Educational Digital Resource Library

There has been an explosion of digital resources available for general surgical education and board preparation. This makes it difficult for a new learner, regardless of their training level, to determine which resources best fit their needs. The uncertainty surrounding resource selection due to the large number of options causes stress, anxiety, and inefficiency for surgical learners. Our objective was to develop a digital surgical educational resource library to assist with selection. A needs assessment via multi-center focus groups encompassing all levels of learners from various subspecialties and training levels (medical students, trainees, junior surgeons, and senior surgeons) was performed to determine what information is desired in a surgical resource library. We conducted follow-up interviews and surveys to learn which resources were most commonly used for studying throughout training. Multi-institutional RESULTS: The initial needs assessment detailed requests for an expansive array of surgical resources characterized by media type and price. We identified 104 resources that met these criteria. There were 33 resources used by medical students, 37 by residents, 16 used specifically for surgical boards preparation, and 25 by attending surgeons. These resources were composed of textbooks, review books, question banks, audio resources, video resources, and review courses. The prices of the resources ranged from free to greater than 400 dollars. A digital resource library should be broad and must address needs that change along a learner's career. Changes and improvements are required not only to meet the changing needs of the learners, but also to ensure the library remains current with the ever-growing number of resources. We plan to incorporate reviews of the resources from those surveyed to help visitors of the online library determine which resources may best suit their needs. Development of a digital resource library may assist learners by helping them easily identify what is available and has been peer reviewed allowing them to determine what best meets their educational needs.

Perceived supervisor support and learner’s career curiosity: the mediating effect of sense of belonging, engagement and self-efficacy

PurposeThis study investigates the relationship between perceived supervisor support (PSS) and learner career curiosity and tests the mediating role of sense of belonging, engagement and learning self-efficacy.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used a three-wave repeated cross-sectional data collected from 509 final-year undergraduate students of 11 Nigerian public universities, who had completed the compulsory work placement to analyze the influence of PSS on learner’s career curiosity via a parallel mediation involving sense of belonging, engagement (behavioural, emotional and cognitive) and self-efficacy.FindingsThe results show that engagement mediates the path through which PSS influences career curiosity. However, the authors found no evidence that sense of belonging and self-efficacy mediated the relationship between PSS and learner’s career curiosity in this population.Originality/valueThe findings of this study highlight the importance of PSS as a resource that influences learner’s career curiosity, particularly during a work placement.

Adult Learner Career Trajectories: Vocational Self-Concept Development in CalWORKs Community College Students

Adult Learner Career Trajectories: Vocational Self-Concept Development in CalWORKs Community College Students

The role of career exploration in career decision participants

AbstractIn the digital era, humans were required to be more able to develop themselves according to potentials owned so that it was important for each individual to understand his/her ability and also able to develop other various skills. Career selection was one of most important decision making processes in individual living. However, today learners were facing various different career environment both in characteristics as well as their kinds, and also trend of learners who were less understand potentials owned both due to their ignorance as well as due to they do not explore nor develop potentials owned so that it gives a negative impact for himself/herself in a career decision so that needed roles of career exploration in a career decision making. Therefore, understanding, awareness and acceptance towards potentialsowned by each individual is necessary in supporting learner career in the future. Efforts conducted in preparing learner career were very much. One of efforts in preparing it was by exploring career. Career exploration was defined as an individual desire to explore or search information towards career information sources. Roles of career exploration in a career decision was related to a career exploration region includes selection orientation, self-exploration, environmental exploration, in-depth environmental exploration, decision status and commitment.

Choosing When to Advise, Coach, or Mentor

Faculty members are expected to guide learners across a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from performance milestones and scholarship to career development and well-being. While a learner may be looking for a quick piece of advice, faculty may see a need for ongoing performance improvement. Alternatively, the learner may want mentoring, while the faculty member plans to offer a single bit of advice. Misaligned expectations can be frustrating for faculty (when a trainee does not appear to listen or act on the guidance offered) and for a trainee, who fails to obtain the desired input. For successful guidance to occur, learner and faculty expectations must be made explicit, and the approaches and time commitments must match the aims of the session.Faculty and trainees lack common, clear terminology surrounding various forms of guidance. Many learners are assigned, or select, advisors and mentors. The recent introduction of “coaching” to the mix has often been done without clarifying similarities, differences, and potential overlap of these roles.Advising, coaching, and mentoring are 3 distinct approaches to providing guidance. Coaching with wisdom combines elements of coaching and mentoring.Each approach has a specific purpose, requires different (but overlapping) expertise, and uses different strategies. Explicit consideration of the 3 approaches and their features can facilitate tailoring these sessions and aligning expectations and plans to goals.An advisor offers strategies about a specific event, which the learner may or may not follow. Mentoring implies a long-term relationship in which experiential wisdom is offered to help build the many aspects of a learner's career. Explicitly stating that your role is to “coach” means that you will help the learner identify a goal and develop solutions through nondirective questions. This process results in the learner identifying strategies that he or she can comfortably employ, increasing the likelihood of follow-through.Understand the continuum of guidance and differentiate advising from coaching from mentoring.The table is a synopsis of the literature based on work that sought to clarify these definitions. Learning about each strategy will help you clarify nuances and allow you to use relevant skills.Explicitly ask the learner what guidance he or she is seeking, align your approach, and explain what you will be providing. Learners do not always know what they want (or need). Clarifying short- and long-term goals can help you select the right strategy and better meet expectations. Once a strategy is selected, discuss with the learner what will and what will not be covered in your interactions.Enjoy the interaction. Watching the “light bulb go on,” seeing progress being made and careers developing, is why many are involved in medical education.Be cautious about switching roles during an interaction. In coaching, the learner develops an individualized plan through questioning. When you have expertise in the area, it is easy to switch into the mentor role. Some call that “coaching with wisdom.” Be very clear that you have switched roles by saying, for example, “I am mentoring you now.” Then switch back to coaching when appropriate.Close each interaction by soliciting feedback to help you improve your use of all strategies. Reflect on how well you stayed in the role, and ask the learner directly. Feedback on the usefulness of your technique allows for deliberate practice of the various guidance strategies and helps you improve in carrying out this role.Review your program's use of the terms advising, coaching, and mentoring. Share the definitions with colleagues. Make sure that all advisors, mentors, and coaches clarify terms, especially when talking with learners.Seek out opportunities to deliberately practice different skills with different levels of learners in different settings and with different topics/focus. When asked for your input, think about what strategy to use. Select words that differentiate advising versus coaching versus mentoring (eg, advising, “You should . . .”; coaching, “What could you do?”; mentoring, “In my experience, this has worked.”).Provide training to faculty and learners on the differences across the spectrum of guidance. Define key features of each method and practice explicitly defining roles during role-plays. Encourage those who are frequently sought out by learners to share techniques that work and those that do not. Take advantage of opportunities to practice with feedback in a low-stakes environment.

The Health Professions Education Pathway: Preparing Students, Residents, and Fellows to Become Future Educators

ABSTRACTProblem: Training the next generation of health professionals requires leaders, innovators, and scholars in education. Although many medical schools and residencies offer education electives or tracks focused on developing teaching skills, these programs often omit educational innovation, scholarship, and leadership and are narrowly targeted to one level of learner. Intervention: The University of California San Francisco created the Health Professions Education Pathway for medical students, residents, and fellows as well as learners from other health professional schools. The Pathway applies the theoretical framework of communities of practice in its curricular design to promote learner identity formation as future health professions educators. It employs the strategies of engagement, imagination, and alignment for identity formation. Context: Through course requirements, learners engage and work with members of the educator community of practice to develop the knowledge and skills required to participate in the community. Pathway instructors are faculty members who model a breadth of educator careers to help learners imagine personal trajectories. Last, learners complete mentored education projects, adopting scholarly methods and ethics to align with the broader educator community of practice. Outcome: From 2009 to 2014, 117 learners participated in the Pathway. Program evaluations, graduate surveys, and web-based searches revealed positive impacts on learner career development. Learners gained knowledge and skills for continued engagement with the educator community of practice, confirmed their career aspirations (imagination), joined an educator-in-training community (engagement/imagination), and disseminated via scholarly meetings and peer-reviewed publications (alignment). Lessons Learned: Learners identified engagement with the learner community as the most powerful aspect of the Pathway; it provided peer support for imagining and navigating the development of their dual identities in the clinician and educator communities of practice. Also important for learner success was alignment of their projects with the goals of the local educator community of practice. Our community of practice approach to educator career development has shown promising early outcomes by nurturing learners' passion for teaching; expanding their interest in educational leadership, innovation, and scholarship; and focusing on their identity formation as future educators.

The Mastery Rubric for Evidence-Based Medicine: Institutional Validation via Multidimensional Scaling

ABSTRACTConstruct: In this study we describe a multidimensional scaling (MDS) exercise to validate the curricular elements composing a new Mastery Rubric (MR) for a curriculum in evidence-based medicine (EBM). This MR-EBM comprises 10 elements of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) representing our institutional learning goals of career-spanning engagement with EBM. An MR also includes developmental trajectories for each KSA, beginning with medical school coursework, including residency training, and outlining the qualifications of individuals to teach and mentor in EBM. The development was not part of the validation effort, as our curriculum is focused at a single stage (undergraduate medical students). Background: An MR comprises the desired KSAs for an entire curriculum, together with descriptions of a learner's performance and/or capabilities as they develop from novice to proficiency of the curricular target(s). The MR construct is intended to support curriculum development or refinement by capturing the KSAs that support the articulation of concrete learning goals; it also promotes assessment that demonstrates development in the target KSAs and encourages reflection and self-directed learning throughout the learner's career. Two other MRs have been published, and this is the first one specific to teaching and learning in medicine; this is also the first one created specifically to evaluate an existing curriculum. Approach: To validate the dispersion of the elements of the EBM curriculum, the nine clinical instructors in the EBM two-course curriculum completed an MDS exercise, rating the similarities of the 10 curricular elements. MDS is a mathematical approach to understanding relationships among concepts/objects when these relationships are difficult to quantify. Eliciting similarity ratings biased the responses toward the null hypothesis (that the elements are not different). Results: MDS results suggested that the MR represents 10 different, although related, facets of the construct “evidence-based medicine.” The results support the makeup of the MR-EBM, and its use to revise our EBM curriculum so that it is more closely aligned with this MR. Conclusions: An MR is a tool, and the MR-EBM that we describe can be useful to develop or evaluate a curriculum in EBM. The MR tool is particularly compatible with the objectives of training for EBM and practice and can be applied to create or evaluate a curriculum using any topical KSA framework. The MR-EBM we describe could be adopted or adapted to represent other institutional objectives for EBM training.

A Longitudinal Study on Learner Career Advancement in MOOCs

In this paper, we present progress towards a longitudinal study of the post-course career advancement of MOOC learners. We present initial results and analysis plans for how to link this to in-course behavior, towards better understanding the goals of all MOOC learners.

Contextual Dynamics in Foreign Language Learning Motivation

Learning context has increasingly been postulated to exert an influence on the dynamics of individual differences in language learning. In a longitudinal design that tested the proficiency gains of 1,682 learners over a 2‐year foreign language program, a multilevel modeling approach was deployed in this study to account for variation in second language (L2) growth over time. Different aspects of learner career and social aspiration were postulated as individual difference factors in addition to the more conventional constructs of extrinsic and intrinsic L2 learning motivation. Perceived attitudinal norms operating within 72 streamed classes were posited as contextual factors. Results of multilevel analyses indicate that the mediating effects of class context on the relation between the L2 proficiency growth and individual difference factors exert both positive and negative influences, suggesting malleability of individual differences factors.

Career Education for Teachers: Reflections on ESF Project Implementation in Latvia

Career Education for Teachers: Reflections on ESF Project Implementation in Latvia In Latvia, the issues of career education are most often addressed by school teachers. In 2003, the Standards of Teacher Profession adopted by the Ministry of Education and Science of Latvia provided the list of teachers' duties, tasks, and specific skills. One of such skills is to help pupils to understand the professional activities and to teach them career planning. This issue is given insufficient attention in teacher professional education. The article aims to use the context of sustainable education to analyze the activities carried out within the National Program Project Career Education Activity Provision in the System of Education co-financed by the European Social Fund. The questionnaires were designed to determine the needs for teacher education in relation to learner's career education. The data were obtained from in-service teachers (N=228) involved in career advising activities for their pupils in all regions of Latvia and were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results approve and elaborate on a necessity of integrating career education issues in the teacher education curriculum.

Learner Perceptions of Quality and the Learner Career

Explores the concept of quality from the perspective of the learner as part of the learning process. Focuses on the centrality of the learner in identifying and working towards building‐in quality to the education and training process. Proposes that, rather than the retrospective approaches to evaluating quality, approaches should be developed which follow the life cycle of the learner. Sees recent curriculum innovations, including the development of modular schemes and proposed funding arrangements in further education, as means of facilitating this approach.

Management development and business ethics: A view from the U.K.

This article is written in the context of current British interest in management training and development, in which an emphasis on “competency” is viewed critically, as technically oriented, with little attention paid to ethics and moral values. It is suggested that a concern for ethics in management development can be expressed in terms of four requisite management “attributes” or “qualities”: theoretical knowledge and understanding; affective qualities; personal and interpersonal skills; and self-knowledge. Following Kohlberg's work on moral development, the cultivation of these attributes is viewed as a life-span process involving three broadly defined forms of management development practice, each appropriate to different circumstances and stages in a learner's career. It is concluded that the conventional teaching of theory, learning from experience and counselling/mentoring, are equally important in the contribution which management development can make to the resolution of ethical dilemmas in business practice.