Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs
The Effectiveness of Different Models of Work-based University Education
Elaine Martin
Curriculum and Academic Development Unit
The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
January 1997
96/19
Evaluations and Investigations Program
Higher Education Division
© Commonwealth of Australia 1996
ISBN 0 642 23613 5
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the Australian Government Publishing Service. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction and rights should be addressed to the manager, Commonwealth Information Services, Australian Government Publishing Service, GPO Box 48, Canberra ACT 2601.
This report is funded under the Evaluations and Investigations Program of the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs.
The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs.
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2. The Development of Work-based University Courses
8. Conclusions and Recommendations
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I wish to acknowledge the cooperation of academic staff involved in the programs involved in this study. I am particularly grateful for the time and support of those staff involved in the case study programs and for the time given by the students of those programs and by employers.
Gillian Fulcher provided research assistance during the data gathering period of the project and Elizabeth Foster provided support in reviewing the literature and both Elizabeth Foster and Cassandra O’Brien for the proof reading.
Helen Saunderson, Ralph Green, Pamela Eakins and John Milton have contributed guidance and advice as members of the project’s Advisory Committee. I am grateful to Michael Prosser for his advice on the Phenomenographic study and I am indebted to Paul Ramsden for his assistance with the development of the Work Experience Questionnaire.
Louise Bricknell, Joan Benjamin and Peter Jamieson have reviewed the draft report and Helen Lennox has been responsible for the preparation of the final document.
Elaine Martin
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This project is an investigation of the work placement component of eight university courses. The overall aim was to evaluate the impact of such schemes on the professional development of students.
Previous work on the workplace component in university courses in the United Kingdom and Australia showed that since the early 1950s such courses have been growing in number. Until very recently, however, there has been little evaluation of the quality of learning which takes place in the courses.
The study covered four vocational areas: health science, engineering, business and social work. Information about the selected schemes was collected by means of interview with the scheme organisers and supplemented with course and advertising materials.
Students from seven of the eight courses completed the Work Experience Questionnaire (WEQ). The instrument aims to measure the workplace learning experiences of students on placement. The Work Experience Questionnaire is a development of the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ), which is currently used nationally by the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DEETYA) to collect information about students’ experiences of the whole of their university courses.
In four of the placements, detailed interviews were conducted with students, employers and academic staff. It was anticipated there would be an association between the quality of student learning and employer satisfaction and models of work-based education.
The main conclusions of the investigation are that:
There is a clear link between the way academic staff think about learning in the workplace; that is what they see it as involving, and how they plan and support the placement. Staff who see workplace learning as problematic believe there is a need for close collaboration with employers and for careful and constant planning of experiences to assist students in their learning. Where staff see workplace learning as non-problematic, such as occurring simply because students are in the right environment, then there is much less effort made to monitor and guide the students or to work closely with the employer.
More importantly, there is a further link between academic staff’s conceptions and practice of work placements, as spelt out above, and students’ perceptions of their own development of generic skills and general satisfaction with the placement. That is, where there is close guidance of experiences and continued joint support by both workplace and university supervisors, students claim to have developed more specific generic skills and to have had more satisfying experiences.
There is a further link between student satisfaction with the placement and with employers’ satisfaction with the scheme.
While there are guidelines for effective practice which can be applied to all work placements, there is no single model of successful practice. Different professions demand different, as well as some similar, qualities and the best placements attend closely to the development of qualities and attributes appropriate for the given profession. In this study, the workplace programs run by Electronic Engineering and Medical Laboratory Science can each be seen as exemplary, though they have different aims and achieve different outcomes.
The Work Experience Questionnaire, which was developed and trialed in this study, is still an undeveloped instrument but, following further refinement, it will be able to effectively measure variation in the effectiveness of the work placement components of university courses.