In vocational education, students learn in different school-based and workplace-based learning environments and engage with different types of knowledge in these environments. Students are expected to integrate these experiences and make meaning of them in relation to their own professional knowledge base. This study focuses both on what types of knowledge students learn in these environments and how they integrate these different types of knowledge. Individual and group interviews were conducted with students, teachers and workplace supervisors in a vocational programme in the Netherlands. Results show that students recognise the importance of vocational knowledge learned in school-based learning environments while they are in the workplace and vice versa, and continuously contextualise knowledge to make it applicable for new circumstances. Also, students learn differently at school due to their experiences in the workplace.
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This article reviews 24 articles in order to get a structured view on student's learning processes when dealing with a combination of school-based learning and workplace learning in vocational education. It focuses on six main themes: students' expertise development, students' learning styles, students' integration of knowledge acquired in school and workplace, processes of knowledge development, students' motivations for learning and students' professional identity development.
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