Background: Clinical reasoning skills are considered to be among the key competencies a physiotherapist should possess. Yet, we know little about how physiotherapy students actually learn these skills in the workplace. A better understanding will benefit physiotherapy education.Objectives: To explore how undergraduate physiotherapy students learn clinical reasoning skills during placements.Design: A qualitative research design using focus groups and semi-structured interviews.Setting: European School of Physiotherapy, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.Participants: Twenty-two undergraduate physiotherapy students and eight clinical teachers participated in this study.Main outcome measures: Thematic analysis of focus groups and semi-structured interviews.Results: Three overarching factors appeared to influence the process of learning clinical reasoning skills: the learning environment, the clinical teacher and the student. Preclinical training failed to adequately prepare students for clinical practice, which expected them to integrate physiotherapeutic knowledge and skills into a cyclic reasoning process. Students’ basic knowledge and assessment structure therefore required further development during the placements. Clinical teachers expected a holistic, multifactorial problem-solving approach from their students. Both students and teachers considered feedback and reflection essential to clinical learning. Barriers to learning experienced by students included time constraints, limited patient exposure and patient communication.Conclusions: Undergraduate physiotherapy students develop clinical reasoning skills through comparison of and reflection on different reasoning approaches observed in professional therapists. Over time, students learn to synthesise these different approaches into their own individual approach. Physiotherapy programme developers should aim to include a wide variety of multidisciplinary settings and patient categories in their clinical placements.
Action research assumes the active engagement of the stakeholders, such as the community, in the research, and a multiple level process of reflection in order to evaluate and monitor the actions taken. This makes action research a suitable methodology to increase critical understanding of the participants. In this paper we describe the challenge of teaching action research within the context of an undergraduate community health psychology module. The module was designed using principles from transformative learning, critical pedagogy and action learning. The module took place over one semester; and 15 (13 females, 2 males) students took part in it. We discuss the background to the module development and the alignment of the learning objectives with the teaching and assessment methods, and reflect upon the students' experiences in the module and the learning outcomes. We conclude by addressing the major challenges involved in teaching action research to increase critical understanding: the ability to deep learning of undergraduate psychology students; our role and expectations as tutors on the course; and the current higher education system in which action science yet has to find a place.
How can undergraduate students be prepared for global citizenship? This question was investigated in a mixed-methods case study of an international, blended one-semester course. Undergraduate honors students (N = 22) from the USA and the Netherlands collaborated to explore what it means to be a member of the global community. Curriculum guidelines from the social justice oriented education for global citizenship were used to analyze the course’s program and focus the case study. The research questions were as follows: 1. How did the course relate to the curriculum guidelines? 2. What and how did students learn from the course? Analyses of the program showed that the course partly reflects the social justice oriented global citizenship education, in particular by addressing intercultural sensitivity and experiential learning. Quantitative measures in a pre-post design with control groups (N = 40) showed some growth in ethical sensitivity and social awareness. Qualitative measures indicated that participants developed a broader view on society and demonstrated a more open and active attitude towards others after the course. Experiential learning was considered a powerful aspect of the pedagogical approach. The results are discussed in relation to a developmental process whereby students gain awareness of global justice issues. © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
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The Dutch floriculture is globally leading, and its products, knowledge and skills are important export products. New challenges in the European research agenda include sustainable use of raw materials such as fertilizer, water and energy, and limiting the use of pesticides. Greenhouse growers however have little control over crop growth conditions in the greenhouse at individual plant level. The purpose of this project, ‘HiPerGreen’, is to provide greenhouse owners with new methods to monitor the crop growth conditions in their greenhouse at plant level, compare the measured growth conditions and the measured growth with expected conditions and expected growth, to point out areas with deviations, recommend counter-measures and ultimately to increase their crop yield. The main research question is: How can we gather, process and present greenhouse crop growth parameters over large scale greenhouses in an economical way and ultimately improve crop yield? To provide an answer to this question, a team of university researchers and companies will cooperate in this applied research project to cover several different fields of expertise The application target is floriculture: the production of ornamental pot plants and cut flowers. Participating companies are engaged in the cultivation of pot plans, flowers and suppliers of greenhouse technology. Most of the parties fall in the SME (MKB) category, in line with the RAAK MKB objectives.Finally, the Demokwekerij and Hortipoint (the publisher of the international newsletter on floriculture) are closely involved. The project will develop new knowledge for a smart and rugged data infrastructure for growth monitoring and growth modeling in the greenhouse. In total the project will involve approximately 12 (teacher) researchers from the universities and about 60 students, who will work in the form of internships and undergraduate studies of interesting questions directly from the participating companies.
