Explicating Students' Personal Professional Theories in Vocational Education through Multi-method Triangulation

A computer-supported method to reveal and assess Personal Professional Theories in vocational education

“…Each of the three methods discussed has been shown to be valid -via measures of interrater reliability -with researchers triangulating the results, and the three together give a good picture of a PPT (Buitink, 1998;Schaap et al, 2011). However, they all have certain individual and shared drawbacks.…”

“…Schaap et al (2011) developed a method to overcome this difficulty. Referring to Eraut (1994Eraut ( , 2000 they distinguished six domains of knowledge: (1) knowledge of the vocational field, such as general issues and trends in the profession; (2) organisational knowledge, including general work processes, information systems, management and cultural aspects (Rauner, 2007); (3) professional knowledge of the organisation one is working in; (4) target group knowledge, e.g.…”

“…To determine the level of concreteness/specificity of a cluster, firstly, each of its examples and clarifications has to be judged as to whether it is concrete/specific or not. Following Schaap et al (2011), the level of concreteness or specificity of a cluster is then defined as 0 (less), 1 (average) or 2 (more) if it contains less than two, two or three, or more than three examples or clarifications that are concrete or specific. Subsequently, the concreteness and specificity of a concept map of a PPT can be determined as the arithmetical means over all its clusters.…”

“…Three frequently encountered methods of revealing and assessing PPTs (Schaap, De Bruijn, Van der Schaaf, Baartman, & Kirschner 2011) are based on: (1) observations and interviews (Scott, Clayton, & Gibson, 1991); (2) process-tracing (Ericsson & Simon, 1984); or (3) elicitation of concepts (McGraw & Harbison-Briggs, 1989). However, these are all too time consuming to be usable in education.…”

Comparing Collective and Personal Professional Theories of Experienced Practitioners

“…A possibility is to use the four qualities Schaap, de Bruijn, van der Schaaf, Baartman and Kirschner (2011) distinguished to characterise a PPT, on CPTs as well.…”