8. Conclusions and Recommendations

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• Provision: Increasing but not Necessarily Improving
• Different Models of Success
• The Work Placement Experience Questionnaire
• Recommendations

Provision: Increasing but not Necessarily Improving

Work placements are an important part of a growing number of university courses. The joint Business/Education Round Table of Australia estimated in 1991 that over half of all Australian first degrees had some workplace experience component (Business Higher Education Round Table 1991). Pressures from government and industry to make higher education more vocationally relevant mean that this figure has almost certainly increased and will continue to grow.

More work placements, however, do not mean better quality of provision. The present investigation indicates that there is considerable variation in the effectiveness of practice and a limited awareness, both amongst academics and in the literature, as to what constitutes effective practice and how it can be encouraged.

This study shows a clear link between the following:

• the way academic staff think about learning in the workplace; that is, what they see workplace learning as involving;

• how they plan and support the placement;

• students’ perceptions of their own development of generic skills and general satisfaction with the placement; and

• the satisfaction of employers with the placement.

It is evident that academic staff who see workplace learning as problematic and needing close collaboration with employers and careful and constant planning are much more likely to produce both students and employers who claim to have benefited considerably from the experience.

In these instances, the assumption is that students will not learn unless they are challenged by situations and problems of an appropriate level of complexity and unless they are supported and encouraged in that learning by both workplace and university supervisors. It is anticipated that through this process of monitoring and support, students will develop very specific skills and qualities as well as general familiarity with workplace ethos and practice.

It is also clear that in the best schemes the workplace and the university are seen as equal partners contributing to the development of vocational practice. Both parties are involved in the planning of the overall experience and in the monitoring and guiding of day to day development.

The least effective courses, on the other hand, assume that being in the workplace will in itself allow students to pick up skills and apply knowledge previously learned in the classroom. Students will learn by osmosis, or by picking up what the employer tells them. It is further assumed that employers and academics will not learn from each other, but will only get in each other’s way; consequently, academics maintain a low profile in the workplace and the placement never becomes a truly collaborative venture.

Different Models of Success

There is no single model of successful practice although aspects can be applied to all work placements. Different professions demand different, as well as similar, qualities, so that the best placements attend closely to the development of qualities and attributes appropriate for the given profession.

For example, in this study:

• Electronic engineering sees itself as a state of the art course and has developed a scheme where state of the art problem solving is central.

• the Medical Laboratory Science course is preparing students for a profession which has recently developed competency-based standards. The placement is consequently designed around the development of specific competencies.

• Accounting believes it must do more to prepare potential leaders and has created a university-based component which works in tandem with the work placement to help students identify and analyse aspects of leadership from within the workplace.

• the Youth Work course is much less focused in its development of specific qualities and attributes and is much less successful in satisfaction ratings from students and employers.

The Work Placement Experience Questionnaire

Overall, in this study of work placements there are clear parallels to be drawn between student learning within the university and student learning in the workplace. The conditions which have been demonstrated in over twenty years of research to encourage effective learning in higher education, such as the need for students to have clear goals and accountability, coupled with strong support, are evident in workplace learning also.

This parallel is illustrated through the development and testing of the Work Experience Questionnaire (WEQ). The WEQ was derived from the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) (Ramsden & Entwistle 1981; Ramsden 1991; Ainley & Long 1995). It shows that, as is demonstrated by the CEQ in university courses, the scales of ‘clear goals’ and ‘support for learning’ correlate highly with student learning.

The Work Experience Questionnaire is still an undeveloped instrument, but there appears little reason to doubt that, following further refinement, it will become as robust as the CEQ and well able to measure variation in the perceptions of students of their work placements.

Recommendations

Recommendation 1

• Closer collaboration is required between workplace and university. Universities and the workplace must work from a premise of mutual benefit. The needs and expectations of each of the parties must be made explicit and, through a collaborative process, a scheme which optimises all interests should be developed. If any party feels it is not benefiting adequately then the scheme will not work to the optimum.

Recommendation 2

• Once needs and expectations of all groups have been established, then desired aims and objectives, together with the processes likely to achieve the aims and objectives, need to be planned collaboratively in terms of timelines, the responsibilities of workplace and academic supervisors and of the students themselves.

Recommendation 3

• Aims and objectives need to include the development and evaluation of specific graduate attributes. It was clear from this study that very specific competences and attributes can be developed through careful guiding of the workplace experience.

The processes in place in the Electronic Engineering and Medical Laboratory Science case studies provide examples of good practice.

1. In the Electrical Engineering case study, participating companies tender for students to address a particular issue or problem. The students, often in teams, and always supervised by a member of academic staff, develop and submit a proposal. This proposal includes a statement addressing how they, the students, will develop as professionals through the exercise, as well as how they will tackle the problem. Students submitting successful proposals work for a full year on the problem together with workplace and academic supervisors. Regular reporting and monitoring of progress and problems means that work rarely proceeds exactly to plan, but outcomes are always satisfying for both employer, student and university.

2. In the Medical Laboratory Science case study, the work experience is carefully planned to attend to eight units of competence identified for medical scientists by the professional body. These units form the basis of a work placement subject guide and they spell out clearly what students must do while they are in the laboratory and what it is expected they will achieve. Students respond to laboratory experience through a journal which is completed daily. This journal serves as the basis for the very regular discussions, at least weekly, with both workplace and academic supervisors. The discussion focuses on what students believe they have learnt, what they are learning or what they are not learning and what is helping or impeding.

3. The workplace and academic supervisors have a joint one day workshop at the beginning of the year where they identify the aims of the placements and how these might best be achieved. There is also a review session for all supervisors at the end of the placement.

4. Academic staff supervising students on such schemes need guidance and support. In-service courses which discuss the roles and responsibilities and the potential difficulties of work placements need to be provided.

5. Academic staff involved in excellent schemes should disseminate details of their schemes through conferences, journal articles and by benchmarking with less successful schemes.

6. Structural support, in terms of a dedicated office for workplace experience, needs to be provided. Through this dedicated office, employers will be sought for partnership and the basic responsibilities and expectations of student, university and workplace will be negotiated. More detailed aspects of the placement will be left to academic staff and students.

7. Time must be set aside for academic staff to support students on these schemes. If a course decides a workplace experience component is necessary for the development of graduate attributes, it must support the scheme with staff and resources, as it would for any other essential component of the course.

8. The Work Experience Questionnaire should be further refined and developed in order to provide a useful tool for measuring students’ perceptions of their work placements. Such an evaluation would provide a sound starting point for planning change and development in courses with workplace experience components.

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