Theme
Portfolios and ePortfolios
Category
Portfolios
INSTITUTION
University Helsinki, Department of General Practice* , Helsinki City Health Center,Finland
The second year students showed an improved understanding towards people coming from various life contexts. Diaries changed their attitudes and enhanced their reflections on their perceptions.
The writing of a reflective diary is viewed as an effective tool for promoting reflection and learning in students, and for self-assessment and evaluation of a clinical learning experience.
EXPERIENCE
(5 visits to health care practices)
Reflection in action:noticing,interviening,personal founding of the experience,intent
REFLECTION
Return to experience: positive feelings, negative feelings,re-evaluation of the experience
RESULTS/LEARNING DIARIES
Create new ideas of existing views and perceptions
(Boud 1985)
This work is a qualitative study of 50 undergraduate (2nd-year) medical students’ reflective diaries of their five visits to the community health care practice. Students interviewed people of various ages and contexts (older people from home care, people from crisis centers, children from kindergartens) and wrote diaries based on these interviews.
They were advised to make a diary where they had to analyzed the interviews and then analyze the feelings that the interaction awoke in them. They were advised to reflect their feelings.
The university teacher read all these diaries, and analyzed them. All fifty diaries were analyzed by qualitative way.
It is possible to teach the medical students to focus on the meaning and understanding the primary health care viewpoint by using learning diaries.
Students’ diaries were analyzed and five following themes rose up from their visits: students ’opinions about patients, their perceptions and how it changes during visits, comments about the usefulness of the visits and reflections to themselves.
Boud, D., Keogh, R. & Walker, D. (eds.) 1985. Reflection. Turning experience into learning. London: Kogan Page.
Lindblom-Ylänne, S. & Lonka, K.(2000). The interaction between the learning environment and the development of expert learning. Lifelong Learning in Europe, 2/2000, 90-97.