Longitudinal case study research to study self-regulation of professional learning

Subtitle:combining observations and stimulated recall interviews throughout everyday work

Professional learning reflects critical processes of change whereby one modifies and extends prior competencies while performing one’s job. Over the past two decades, the need has emerged and grown for insights on how employees take responsibility for their own learning and engage in self-regulation of professional learning. However, the process of measuring professional learning as well as self-regulation of professional learning during everyday work has raised difficult methodological problems for various reasons. The retrospective, cross-sectional, self-report measurement techniques often used, tend to de-contextualise learning from the complex environments in which professionals operate. Under such techniques, study participants are asked to make abstractions of this complexity to self-report regarding possibly implicit, multifaceted competencies and metacognitive strategy use as features of self-regulated learning. In this chapter, we offer an alternative approach via a longitudinal multiple case study design combining long-term observations with immediate consecutive stimulated recall interviews, towards building a more dynamic and situated understanding of professional learning through which to explore participants’ self-regulation. Using both ‘on-line’ and ‘off-line’ measurement techniques, the proposed interactive approach was empirically applied to investigate self-regulation of professional learning in medical practice. Without pretentiously suggesting that this is the ultimate research solution, we aim to outline the approach, its opportunities and challenges, how to tackle these challenges, and how the approach’s research insights could function to advance theory-building on professional learning in general—and self-regulation of professional learning in particular—in everyday work.

ISBN:978-3-031-08517-8

Publication year:2022

Keywords:H1 Book chapter

Accessibility:Closed