Page 85 - Medical students’ self-regulated learning in clinical contexts

own learning, o en using ine cient strategies whilst thinking they are doing well.42 Similarly, many of the stories in our study involved numerous aspects of limited awareness about students’ own learning processes.
Strengths and limita ons
One of the strengths of this study was the use of Day Reconstruc on Method. It helped to minimize bias through long-term recall of events, which has shown to be subject to memory, emo ons and beliefs, with par cipants’ o en focusing on those events that have the biggest emo onal value.43 However, recall studies will always su er from some memoriza on bias. One possible memoriza on bias can be that many choices may be memorized as ac ve choices when asked about it, but were in fact subconscious choices when they happened.44
Another strength of our study was that a recently graduated MD performed the interviews. This allowed us to create an atmosphere in which both interviewer and par cipant were interac ng as equals. The interviewer was a medical student less than 2 years ago, which enabled him to relate to par cipants’ situa ons. On the other hand, personal experiences of the interviewer likely had an in uence on the interview and what other interes ng informa on was pursued besides the DRM. We are aware of this and therefore some interviews were coded with another author, also paying a en on to the phrasing of the ques ons to make sure these were not sugges ve.
We regard our sampling strategy as both a strength and weakness of our study. Our sampling enabled us to include students from two medical facul es using di erent pedagogical approaches. These students were enrolled in several di erent clerkships, in many di erent loca ons, increasing the transferability of our ndings within the Dutch context. However, because we only included students from Dutch universi es li le can be said about the interna onal transferability where students and contexts may be very di erent.
Implica ons for prac ce and future research
Self-regulated learning is not a simple process in a student’s mind that is easy to intervene on, but is a complex and adap ve system emerging in a clinical context. It is very di cult to generalize how to support self-regulated learning because this complex system is unique for every person in every context. One could think about several approaches, for example increasing student awareness about their own learning process could be a good start for this. Making students more aware of their
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Chapter 4
Exploring the factors in uencing
clinical students’ self-regulated learning