Page 133 - Medical students’ self-regulated learning in clinical contexts

understand who we are, what our prior experiences are, and how our iden es may have colored the results we found. This hopefully helps readers understand our in u- ence during data gathering, analysis, and wri ng up.
In my research I have tried to be transparent, trustworthy and rigorous. This also means that I acknowledge there will always remain a degree of uncertainty regarding the outcomes of the studies presented in this thesis. For instance, we now know that mul ple pa erns in how students engage in self-regulated learning exist, however we cannot be sure that all pa erns that exist were found in the study presented in chapter 5. Likewise, as I have explained in the previous sec on, our ndings regard- ing SRL appeared to closely relate to other theories used in educa on sciences. How- ever, these similari es were not explicitly addressed in the studies presented, and conceptual links need to be looked into in more detail. My ndings give us an insight in the SRL of our par cipants, but may be very di erent for other par cipants or in another se ng.
With this thesis using mostly qualita ve data I have gained a deeper understand- ing of how self-regulated learning works in clinical contexts. However, quan ta ve research would be required to determine the size of e ect that rou nes of clinical departments (chapter 2), single people (chapter 3) and the four main factors in u- encing SRL (chapter 4) have on SRL.
Strengths and limita ons of this thesis
In scien c research, any study will have certain strengths and limita ons. I regard the fact that I used mostly qualita ve data to answer the overall research ques on of how students self-regulated their learning in clinical contexts as a strength because it enabled me to engage in a discussion with students about how they approach this. Conduc ng these studies as a recently graduated MD is another strength, because this created a low hierarchical di erence between par cipant and researcher. Addi- onally, because of my own experiences, I was able to understand and envision the situa ons students discussed and ask meaningful follow-up ques ons. I am aware that this also opens up the possibility of the results represen ng my personal expe- riences too much. Therefore I collaborated with having a mul -ins tu onal, mul - disciplinary research team as to prevent this from happening excessively and using a variety of professional perspec ves to interpret the ndings. Lastly, I regard using di erent ‘grain sizes’ to look at the process of self-regulated learning in clinical con- texts as a strength of this thesis. As Brydges and Butler pointed out, it is valuable if consecu ve studies use a narrow and a broad focus as to best understand SRL.1 I
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Chapter 6 General Discussion