2024 Lee Rusznyak & Cecilie Betzer: Using Semantics to help students succeed in work-based learning

Time spent in the workplace can be invaluable in preparing students for practice. However, not all time spent results in meaningful learning. In this Roundtable, we discuss two studies that use Semantics to reveal how work-based placements can offer meaningful learning opportunities but may sometimes result in students accumulating little more than hours. First, Cecilie Betzer discusses her observations of student nurses during home visits to elderly patients. She shows that without a mentor, students tend to focus on the mechanics of small individual tasks. When working alongside experienced mentors, they made far more links between these tasks and the treatment plan, enacting many more semantic codes. Second, Lee Rusznyak considers the case of student teachers going back to school. As student teachers have already spent many years in classrooms, it is often assumed that they should be well-equipped to learn by observing teachers’ classroom practices. However, when they do not notice how teachers work with ideas, their observations tend to focus on describing activities and routines, producing superficial and fragmented accounts of teachers’ work. Semantics shows how a structured introduction to knowledge-building can redirect students’ focus onto teachers’ core practices and help their observations become more nuanced and coherent. These studies illustrate two ways of using Semantics to study the quality of student learning: by comparing the impact of different levels of supervision, and by analysing changes over time. Both studies show how work-based learning can enhance or restrict opportunities for meaningful experiential learning. We explore the implications of these studies for ensuring that students can make the most of their opportunities to learn during their work-based practicals.