Placement education pedagogy as social participation: what are students really learning?

Background And Purpose: This paper draws on empirical fieldwork data of naturally occurring UK physiotherapy placement education to make visible how education is actually carried out and suggest what students may be learning through their placement interactions. The data challenge everyone involved in placement education design and practice to consider the values and practices students are learning to perpetuate through placement education experiences.

Methods: The researcher undertook an ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic observation of naturally occurring physiotherapy placement education in two UK NHS placement sites.

"Disciplining witnesses" in the teaching of physiotherapy: some insights into the practical accomplishment of a science-based healthcare profession.

Physiotherapy in the UK defines itself as a "science-based healthcare profession". Physiotherapy students must undertake at least one thousand hours of learning in live practice settings. Adopting an analytic stance shaped by interaction analysis and workplace studies, and drawing on observational data of placement settings, this paper examines some features of the means by which physiotherapy education is practically accomplished.

Approaches to learning on placement: the students' perspective.

Background And Purpose: With Continuing Professional Development activity, a requirement of Allied Health Professional registration in the UK and said to be most effectively supported by practitioners who adopt a deep approach to learning, a UK university has been exploring how its pre-registration curriculum influences learner development. This paper investigates the possible influences of the clinical placement component of the curriculum that is structured as four 4-week blocks during both Years 2 and 3 of the 3-year BSc (Hons) programme. A range of placement models are used within this structure including the traditional 1:1 educator : student ratio and those that have a higher ratio of student(s) : educator(s).

Undergraduates' learning profile development: what is happening to the men?

Higher Education Institutions in the UK that offer programmes leading to professional registration with the Health Professions Council have been charged to provide the National Health Service with graduating autonomous professionals. Autonomous professionals are said to need: (a) self-directed learning skills and attributes; (b) a positive academic self-efficacy; (c) an internal academic locus of control and (d) a positive academic self-concept. The curricular influences on the development of these learning profile skills and attributes can be mapped overtime using batteries of self-rated inventories.

Student learning preferences reflect curricular change.

This study measured the learning preference profile development and readiness for self-directed learning over time of two undergraduate student cohorts experiencing different curricular presentations of essentially the same syllabus. The results from three measurement points are reported following each cohort through their first half of the BSc (Honours) Physiotherapy Course, Cardiff. At intake both cohorts preferred a concrete, fact-based learning environment, which was teacher structured.