Student Perceptions of the Way that they are Supervised during Work Experience: an instrument and some findings

ABSTRACT

This paper is intended as a contribution to the debate and evaluation activity which in the UK is following Dearing's recommendation that more work experience should be provided for more higher education students. The paper gives an instrument for researching students’ perceptions of the roles their workplace supervisors play. Two surveys using the instrument and involving a total of 669 students on different courses in the field of teacher education are reported. In the surveys, the responses of many students suggested that they had received ‘good’ (i.e. theoretically desirable) supervision in the workplace but this was not the case for all students. There were for example clear differences across courses and, in addition, the course whose students appeared to have experienced the least desirable kind of supervision subsequently suffered the highest rate of student drop‐out. In contrast, students who had apparently received the ‘best’ kind of workplace supervision tended to be happier with their workplace experience as a whole. In discussing the findings, the paper draws attention to their limitations, pointing out that much more needs to be known about the work experience which is offered to HE students across the disciplines and across the country. The paper suggests that specific as well as general instruments will probably need to be developed for researching this and suggests that, since it is general, the instrument described in the paper might be useful to other HE researchers who wish to evaluate their students’ work experience. The paper concludes by situating the increasing interest in work experience for higher education students in the wider context in which links between ‘work’ and ‘education’ are becoming increasingly blurred.