How medical students compose personal co-regulation networks across clerkships
Derk Bransen, Erik Driessen, Dominique Sluijsmans, Marjan Govaerts
BMC Medical Education
Network design
Nodes
medical students as focal actors and the peers, supervisors, clinicians, family members, and others they named for learning regulation
Ties
ego-reported contacts used for co-regulation purposes such as feedback, reflection, goal setting, and emotional or practical support
Methods
The authors described alter roles and functions within personal networks, calculated proportions by contact category, and used analysis of variance to compare network composition across clerkship years.
Source: BMC Medical Education
Reviewed summary
A questionnaire completed by 403 medical students, a 65.5 percent response rate, mapped the people they approached for co-regulated learning and the purposes those contacts served. Later-year students reported proportionally more supervisors and fewer peers in their personal learning networks. The study gives educators a relational lens on self-regulated learning and highlights that students regulate learning with a changing constellation of people rather than entirely by themselves.
As students progressed, supervisors occupied a larger share and peers a smaller share of reported co-regulation networks, suggesting that access to support is reorganized across the clinical curriculum. The 403 responses were cross-sectional rather than repeated observations of the same students, all ties were self-reported, nonresponse may change network composition, and proportional differences do not show that clerkship progression caused the shift or that one composition is better.
SNA
How SNA was used
The study defined medical students as focal actors and the peers, supervisors, clinicians, family members, and others they named for learning regulation as nodes and ego-reported contacts used for co-regulation purposes such as feedback, reflection, goal setting, and emotional or practical support as ties. The authors described alter roles and functions within personal networks, calculated proportions by contact category, and used analysis of variance to compare network composition across clerkship years.
Source
BMC Medical Education, 22, Article 193
DOI: 10.1186/s12909-022-03259-0
