Phd Thesis Higher professional education aims to prepare graduates for the complexity of professional practices. The development of conceptual understanding is important to deal adequately with this complexity, especially in an unstructured professional domain such as international business. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the concept conceptual understanding in this professional domain, how it can be measured, what it looks like, how it changes, and in what ways it differs between students. The dissertation comprises five empirical studies for which data collection took place at a university of applied sciences in the Netherlands.
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Conceptual understanding is important for professionals because a broad and deep synthesis of knowledge enables flexible and original thinking in complex problem solving. However, little is known about the appearance of conceptual understanding at the student level. This article therefore investigates the appearance of conceptual understanding in writing, since writing skills are a highly rated competency in both education and professional domains like international business. 44 students in their final year studying international business wrote literature reviews to illustrate how different levels (negligible, weak, moderate, strong and extraordinary) appeared for six components of conceptual understanding (global context, local context, business practices, practice instances, business concepts and business mechanisms). Two results are suggested. The first is that conceptual understanding in students’ writing is broad rather than deep, suggesting fragmented rather than integrated knowledge needed for conceptual understanding. The second is that different patterns of conceptual understanding emerge between and within students’ writing, both in the varying depths of conceptual understanding per component and in the different ways conceptual understanding manifests. Methodological issues and further research are discussed. Implications for education include suggestions for teachers to stimulate knowledge integration for conceptual understanding through the use of rubrics and iterative cycles.
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This study aims to identify an adequate approach for revealing conceptual understanding in higher professional education. Revealing students’ conceptual understanding is an important step towards developing effective curricula, assessment and aligned teaching strategies to enhance conceptual understanding in higher education. Essays and concept maps were used to determine how students’ conceptual understanding of international business can be revealed adequately.
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Higher professional education aims to prepare students for professional practice, for which students will need to develop conceptual understanding. Conceptual understanding requires a synthesis of relevant facts, theories and practices. This research explores what types of change take place in students’ conceptual understanding during a bachelor course. Forty-four senior international business majors in the Netherlands wrote expository essays at the beginning and end of a 14-week course. A rubric was used to grade the essays on six components of conceptual understanding using a 5-point scale. Results indicated five types of change: regressive, minor, modest, substantial and major. The most significant increases in conceptual understanding appeared to relate to context-specific or conceptual knowledge. Results also indicated that individual students’ conceptual understanding changed in different ways, with improvements in some components and deterioration in others, particularly global context. Discussion includes suggestions to account for the different types of change, and curricular implications.
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Higher education providers need to deliver graduates with the conceptual understanding required for professional life. Conceptual understanding entails a synthesis of relevant facts, theories and practices that influence occupational performance. To help align curricula with individual student differences, this study investigates differences in international business undergraduates’ conceptual understanding with regard to study progress. Seventy-four international business students of a bachelor’s programme in the Netherlands participated. Students were presented with a complex business problem. They then wrote essays in which they explicated their conceptual understanding of the case. Using a rubric, six components of conceptual understanding were graded on a 5-point scale ranging from negligible to extraordinary. Results indicated three types of conceptual understanding: limited, developing and extensive. Their relationship with study progress was nonlinear, indicating that effects other than curriculum may account for differences between students. Suggestions are made to account for differences, and recommendations are made regarding curriculum development.
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Higher professional education aims to prepare students for professional practice, for which students will need to develop conceptual understanding. Conceptual understanding requires a synthesis of relevant facts, theories and practices. This research explores what types of change take place in students’ conceptual understanding during a bachelor course. Forty-four senior international business majors in the Netherlands wrote expository essays at the beginning and end of a 14-week course. A rubric was used to grade the essays on six components of conceptual understanding using a 5-point scale. Results indicated five types of change: regressive, minor, modest, substantial and major. The most significant increases in conceptual understanding appeared to relate to context-specific or conceptual knowledge. Results also indicated that individual students’ conceptual understanding changed in different ways, with improvements in some components and deterioration in others, particularly global context. Discussion includes suggestions to account for the different types of change, and curricular implications.
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The focus of the thesis is an exploration into students’ vocational knowledge in the context of Dutch vocational education and training (VET). The reason students’ vocational knowledge requires exploration is because there is no consensus among scholars in the field of VET about how to theorise the nature of students’ vocational knowledge; most (not all) scholars rely on dichotomous conceptualisations, such as theory versus practice, general versus specific or explicit versus implicit. However, such commonly used dichotomies are not very helpful to understand the complex nature of vocational knowledge. Vocational knowledge is more than putting bits of theoretical and practical knowledge together, it is characterised by sometimes-intimate relationships between knowledge and actions. As a result of the above-mentioned gap in the VET literature, there is little empirical research on how VET students develop vocational knowledge and the extent to which this is occupation-specific knowledge. To understand students’ vocational knowledge, four different aims are formulated and carried out in four studies. The aim of the first study is to identify powerful vocational learning environments to enable the selection of a case that represents high quality vocational learning and teaching. With an eye on analysing students’ vocational knowledge, the second study aims to conceptualise the nature of vocational knowledge that avoids dichotomies. Therefore, two conceptual frameworks are integrated; the idea of contextualising is introduced which is based on cultural-historical theory to highlight the crucial role activity plays in knowledge development and to understand the relationships between the mind (i.e., what people think (and feel)), and action (i.e., what people do). Secondly, the theory is supplemented with ideas from inferentialism, a philosophical semantic theory of meaning to provide a useful way to focus on students’ processes of knowing and to reveal students’ vocational knowledge in terms of ongoing reasoning processes. The third study uses the conceptualisation of vocational knowledge to explore how students develop vocational knowledge in occupational practice, and to illustrate the process of contextualising. The forth study aims to describe what characterises students’ vocational knowledge using an analytic framework that distinguishes between occupation-specific knowledge components and qualities. This thesis contributes to research scholarship in the field of VET and an understanding of students’ vocational knowledge in practice. The theoretical framework of contextualising supplemented with inferentialism provides an alternative way to focus on students’ processes of knowing and helps to reveal students’ vocational knowledge in terms of reasoning processes. The empirical explorations and illustrations of students’ vocational knowledge contribute to the scholarly literature and practice on understanding the nature of vocational knowledge, how students develop vocational knowledge and what characterises their vocational knowledge. The intention to introduce the idea of contextualising is not about reinventing the wheel but rather an attempt to understand how it turns and how it functions. The intention of this thesis is to encourage dialogue and move the debate about the nature of vocational knowledge further, and hence, to provide some “food for thought”.
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In this workshop we present three lesson activities to teach core (astro)physics concepts at pre-university level which students find difficult to grasp with traditional interventions: star properties, star states and the fusion-gravity balance. In each activity, students construct and simulate a conceptual cause-effect model. An evaluation study in nine Dutch classrooms showed that the star properties lesson significantly increased students’ understanding of the underlying causal relationships. The lessons were created as part of the Stargazing Live! project, which inspires students with an interactive planetarium lesson incorporating real astrophysical data before triggering deep learning with the conceptual modelling activities.
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When teaching grammar, one of the biggest challenges teachers face is how to make their students achieve conceptual understanding. Some scholars have argued that metaconcepts from theoretical linguistics should be used to pedagogically and conceptually enrich traditional L1 grammar teaching, generating more opportunities for conceptual understanding. However, no empirical evidence exists to support this theoretical position. The current study is the first to explore the role of linguistic metaconcepts in the grammatical reasoning of university students of Dutch Language and Literature. Its goal was to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of students’ grammatical conceptual knowledge and reasoning and to investigate whether students’ reasoning benefits from an intervention that related linguistic metaconcepts to concepts from traditional grammar. Results indicate, among other things, that using explicit linguistic metaconcepts and explicit concepts from traditional grammar is a powerful contributor to the quality of students’ grammatical reasoning. Moreover, the intervention significantly improved students’ use of linguistic metaconcepts.
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Students’ health profession education includes learning at the workplace through placements. For students, participating in daily work activities in interaction with supervisors, co-workers and peers is a valuable practice to learn the expertise that is needed to become a health care professional. To contribute to the understanding of HPE-students’ workplace learning, the focus of this study is to identify affordances and characterise student’s participation during placements. We applied a research design based on observations. Three student-physiotherapists and four student-nurses were shadowed during two of their placement days. A categorisation of affordances is provided, in terms of students’ participation in activities, direct interactions and indirect interactions. Students’ daily participation in placements is discussed through unique combinations and sequences of the identified affordances reflecting changing patterns over time, and differences in the degree of presence or absence of supervisors, co-workers and peers.
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