Page 131 - Medical students’ self-regulated learning in clinical contexts

facts, tools, aims, goals, procedures, values and norms of a context.27 Similarly, these in uences proved to be important aspects of how a clinical context and students can interact to in uence students’ SRL as we found in chapters 2, 3, and 4. Altogether, using these theories helps us understand how clinical SRL works, and that it is more complex than in classroom se ngs.
According to Sitzmann and Ely the outcomes of SRL in voca onal contexts is greatly a ected by mo va on.19 Self-Determina on Theory describes how intrinsic mo va- on is most bene cial for learning, and that it requires three psychological needs: autonomy, a feeling of relatedness, and a feeling of competence.22,23 This may explain why autonomy was also a major factor resul ng from our study reported in chapter 4. Addi onally, students frequently reported in chapters 2 and 3 that they wanted to feel they were part of a clinical team, wanted to feel reciprocity for the amount of e ort they put into a clerkship and wanted to be able to take responsibili es. We consider these to be appearances of an ul mate need for a feeling of relatedness and self-e cacy. The need for relatedness has never been described in SRL theories, but makes sense when combined with the Self-Determina on Theory and Achievement Goal Theory.28
Achievement Goal Theory gives us an insight in why students may decide to work on certain goals and why they may expect be er results from pursuing some of their own set goals, rather than those of a curriculum. Achievement Goal Theory is a mo va on-theory aiming to answer how students approach learning using three types of goals. These goals can either be learning oriented, or performance oriented. Learning oriented goals aim for achieving excellence. Performance oriented goals are classi ed di erently in varying theories, but generally can either aim for making a good impression (proving goal orienta on, performance-approach goal orienta on), aim for avoiding to look incompetent (avoiding goal orienta on, performance-avoid orienta on), be intrinsically driven to perform (rela ve ability goal orienta on), or extrinsically driven to perform (extrinsic goal orienta on). 24,25,29–31 Students gener- ally have a natural tendency to adopt one of these types of goals most frequently in challenging situa ons, which is referred to as their goal orienta on.32 Research using Achievement Goal Theory has studied how di erent goals lead to varying degrees of adap ve learning behavior, self-regula on, self-e cacy and performance.31 Students aiming for learning oriented goals showed most adap ve learning behavior, higher self-regula on, higher self-e cacy and be er performance. This shows close similar- i es with the ‘engaged’ pa ern in SRL behavior we found in chapter 5, which might imply these students mostly pursue learning oriented goals in their SRL. Students
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Chapter 6 General Discussion