Page 86 - Medical students’ self-regulated learning in clinical contexts

84
learning may improve their exibility in using di erent learning strategies in di erent situa ons, and thereby increase the learning e ec veness of the clerkships.45 Increasing students’ awareness about their own learning process can be done by promo ng general awareness about metacogni on, improving knowledge about cogni on, improving the regula on of cogni on, and by fostering an environment that promotes metacogni ve awareness by focusing on mastery rather than performance.46 Previous studies have looked at the e ects of teaching speci c SRL- skills to students learning on an academic level, which looked promising.47–49 We suggest further research to understand what the e ect of such a training would be on self-regulated learning in a clinical context.
It also seems important to o er more tailored learning opportuni es and supports necessary for students to self-regulate their learning, as students are known to have di erent needs.50 A way of doing this might be to individualize clerkship assignments, dependent of a students’ future career choice, something that looked promising in a recent small scale study.51 Another sugges on could be to more thoroughly assess the needs of individual students, because it is unlikely that one solu on will work for all students. A possible way of doing this could be to see if administering an exis ng measurement tool for self-regulated learning can provide the informa on necessary to create a more tailored learning experience. If exis ng measurement tools seem un t for this, developing a new measurement tool speci cally designed for this could be a solu on. Catering for the individual needs of students may help them improve their self-regulated learning skills and master their own life-long learning.
Our study contributes insight into what factors in uence the self-regulated learning process. Future research should study the in uence of making students more aware of their own learning on self-regulated learning in a clinical context. It is also interes ng to study the in uence of increased tailored opportuni es for students to self-regulated learning. It may also be interes ng to see if we could categorize the large individual di erences we found in students’ self-regulated learning behavior, making it more easy to grasp and making it easier to study the e ects of these di erences in behavior. Lastly, students’ self-regulated learning is in uenced by the expected outcomes of learning ac vi es; it would be interes ng to study what the rela onship between these expected outcomes and actual learning outcomes is.