Page 75 - Medical students’ self-regulated learning in clinical contexts

Data collec on
The rst author (JB) conducted all the interviews. Three pilot interviews were used to test an ini al interview guide. This resulted in the addi on of the Day Reconstruc on Method (DRM) as a tool to aid students’ recall of the diverse ac vi es they engaged in.33,34 The goal of the DRM is “to get an accurate picture of the experience associated with ac vi es and circumstances and to elicit speci c and recent memories, [...] thereby reducing errors and biases of recall”.33 This is achieved by making a diary consis ng of a sequence of episodes. Because we used the DRM to re ect on the previous workday, only students who could schedule the interview the day a er a clerkship-day were included in the study. Two students were excluded from the study due to scheduling problems to meet the aforemen oned requirement for the DRM.
At the start of the interview, we asked par cipants to ll in the diary pages of the DRM. This was used as the main prompt for the interview. Per ac vity they were asked to describe what they had done, who were involved in the ac vity, what choices they had made, why they made these choices, and what the results of their choices were. Follow-up ques ons focused on the three phases of the self-regulated learning cycle and included ques ons about learning goals, monitoring progress towards their learning goals, and evalua ng/re ec ve ac vi es.9 Although the DRM was used as a star ng point for the interviews, other interes ng issues were also pursued during the interviews. The interviews lasted for approximately one hour.
The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verba m. Students were given an alias. A er each interview, the rst author performed a preliminary analysis and provided the par cipant with a single page summary of the interview as a member check. All par cipants veri ed the summary of the interview, with two par cipants sugges ng small revisions.
Data analysis
The rst and second author met weekly during a period of 8 months. The rst 5 mee ngs involved training the rst author (JB) in coding within grounded theory, by the second author (EH) who has much experience in this eld. They both read the rst 5 transcripts and assigned ini al codes on a line-by-line basis for training purposes. Next, the rst author interviewed the other par cipants, directly followed by open coding, and in a later stage by axial coding of the data and interpre ve analysis. Subsequent mee ngs between the rst and second author in between the interviews and a er the nal interview were used to discuss the emerging concepts. To further develop our interpreta ons, the rst and second author kept memos
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Chapter 4
Exploring the factors in uencing
clinical students’ self-regulated learning