This thesis presents an exploration of ‘how entrepreneurship education pedagogy can enhance undergraduate business students’ autonomous motivation for self-directed learning’. It has twin, equally valuable, purposes: to make an original theoretical contribution and to improve professional practice in this area. The work addresses the lack of pedagogical research in entrepreneurship education that focuses on learner development, with a specific aim at development of self-directed learning skills for lifelong learning. The research is approached with a concurrent, mixed methods design, comparing pre- and a post-EE, self-assessment survey results from 245 students, enrolled in a Young Enterprise venture creation programme, and a control group at a Dutch university. With the use of open-question surveys among the same population, during and after the EE modules, as well as from focus group discussions with a selection of participating students and teachers, explanation was sought for the observations drawn from the quantitative study. Significant relationships were found between students’ self-reported maturity of autonomy, self-efficacy, and motivation for learning, and in how these relate to self-directed learning readiness. Entrepreneurship education was found to significantly moderate the relationship between the learning characteristics and self-directed learning, and to strengthen of the students’ perceived readiness for self-directed learning. Explanation for the impact of EE were found to be related to the stage-wise, mixed pedagogy approach to learning, that combines authentic learning with a hierarchical approach to competence development, and supportive team dynamics. The research contributes to practice with a proposed conceptual framework for understanding how to prepare for self-directed learning readiness and a teaching-learning framework for its development in formal educational settings. It contributes to knowledge with its deeper understanding of how students experience learning in EE and how that affects their willingness to pursue learning opportunities.
MULTIFILE
PURPOSE: It is assumed that case-based questions require higher order cognitive processing, whereas questions that are not case-based require lower order cognitive processing. In this study, we investigated to what extent case-based questions and questions that are not case-based, relate to Bloom's taxonomy.METHODS: In this article, 4800 questions of the Progress Test were classified whether it was a case-based question and the level of Bloom's taxonomy. Lower-order questions require students to remember or/and basically understand the knowledge. Higher-order questions require students to apply, analyze, or/and evaluate. A phi-coefficient was calculated to investigate the relations between the presence of case-based questions and the required level of cognitive processing.RESULTS: Our results demonstrated that case-based questions were measuring higher levels of cognitive processing in 98.1% of the questions. Of the non-case-based questions, 33.7% required a higher level of cognitive processing. The phi-coefficient demonstrated a significant moderate correlation between the presence of a patient case in a question and its required level of cognitive processing (phi-coefficient = 0.55, p<0.001).CONCLUSION: Medical teachers should be aware of the association between item formats (case-based versus non-case-based) and the cognitive processes they elicit in order to meet a certain balance in a test, taking the learning objectives as well as the test difficulty into account.
The principal aim of this study is to explore the relations between work domains and the work-related learning of workers. The article is intended to provide insight into the learning experiences of Dutch police officers during the course of their daily work. Interviews regarding actual learning events and subsequent changes in knowledge, skills or attitudes were conducted with police officers from different parts of the country and in different stages of their careers. Interpretative analyses grounded in the notion of intentionality and developmental relatedness revealed how and in what kinds of work domains police officers appear to learn. HOMALS analysis showed work-related learning activities to vary with different kinds of work domains. The implications for training and development involve the role of colleagues in different hierarchical positions for learning and they also concern the utility of the conceptualisation of work-related learning presented here.
