How to understand students' meeting with the content and structure of their studies

The project investigates students' process of creating a professional profile through their studies.

In order to develop a theoretical framework as well as understand the students' development of a professional identity, an empirical study was made of 8 students attending an undergraduate course in 'GIS in planning and management'.

Project participants

Lene Møller Madsen, Frederik Voetmann Christiansen and Camilla Rump, Department of Science Education, DSE, University of Copenhagen.

Project duration: 2008 - 2011 - financed by the DSE.

Detailed project description 

When a student completes a master degree in a subject he/she has developed a professional profile based on the choices made in the course of the study. This profile characterises the student and her professional competences. Many of the ideas and values held by the student when she entered the programme have been abandoned; others have been reinforced by the learning experiences. Few students follow a straight trajectory based on ideas and values held when they enrolled, and even fewer just adopt a new set of ideas provided by the study programme.

When a student engages in a science education programme he/she has personal reasons for doing that. In the courses that the student follows, these personal reasons are gradually moulded and transformed in interplay with the work practices and the content knowledge encountered in the meeting with study. In this project we investigate this moulding process in an empirical study of 8 students attending an undergraduate course in "GIS in planning and management" at the University of Copenhagen.

To analyse this process of acquiring a professional profile we adapt Kuhn's work (1959, 1974, 1977), that is his description of the essential tension, learning by ostension, and his theory of values and choice of theory. Based on the developed theoretical framework the paper analyses how students' personal desiderata interact and are transformed during the GIS-course in respect to their choices concerning including GIS in their future professional profile.