Content area
Full text
Learning professional practices in higher education
Professionals in any field conduct their daily activities, tasks and routines based on their professional knowledge, skills and ideals (Blömeke et al., 2015). The activities as well as the inherent knowledge, skills and ideals the professionals apply collectively amount to their professional practices (Gherardi, 2009; Kelly, 2008), which are realized by individual practitioners (Roth and Lee, 2006). Novice learners entering a profession benefit from engaging in professional practices during their education – for example, as part of a higher education program – to learn the knowledge, skills and ideals relevant and necessary to cope with authentic practice situations. To focus professional education on the most relevant professional practices, two important fields of higher education – teacher education and medical education – have attempted to identify sets of core practices that might be addressed in higher education curricula (Grossman, 2021; Ten Cate and Taylor, 2021).
However, offering students opportunities for engaging in authentic practice situations involves several constraints: access to real-life practice situations is restricted by ethical boundaries, as real-life practice situations involve taking over responsibility (e.g. for students and patients), for which especially novice learners might not yet be sufficiently qualified (Ziv et al., 2003). In addition, because task difficulty cannot be adapted to suit the learning goals and the learners’ current level of knowledge and skills, real-life practice situations do not necessarily serve as ideal learning opportunities or tasks.
An effective instructional approach that eludes these constraints entails the use of simulation-based learning (Chernikova et al., 2020). Simulations are simplified but valid representations of natural, social or artificial systems, which include features that learners can manipulate (e.g. to approximate practice; Heitzmann et al., 2019; Sauvé et al., 2007). Using simulation-based learning provides learners with opportunities for engaging repeatedly in professional practices without facing or generating real-life risks (Heitzmann et al., 2019). In addition, designing simulations allows instructors to balance the learning tasks’ authenticity and difficulty – for example, by simplifying practice situations and incorporating additional learner support to avoid overwhelming novice learners ( Codreanu et al., 2020).
Existing literature on designing simulations primarily focuses on process models addressing the steps of designing simulations for specific contexts, for example designing simulation for...