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Vocational education aims at preparing students for their future as professionals; thus, students are often required to undergo a form of on-the-job learning. Assessment of professional performance during on-the-job learning is not based on single observations, but on prolonged participation at the workplace culminating in judgement by a workplace educator. However, little is known about "how" educators reach a judgement. This paper, therefore, aims at exploring how educators inform their judgements about students' professional performance. We consider the workplace to be a participatory learning environment, which entails that judgement about professional performance should be made in relation to the community students participated in and that the educator from that community has a central role. Our study takes an explorative approach based on interviews and uses template analysis to generate insight. Findings revealed that educators use multiple strategies to gather and process information about students to inform their judgement. Findings also showed that assessment starts at the first meeting, when the educator forms a first impression of the student and judges whether or not the student is suitable for the job. Educators at the workplace also showed that they are aware of the context in which they form their judgement.

The assessment of workplace learning by educators at the workplace is a complex and inherently social process, as the workplace is a participatory learning environment. We therefore propose seeing assessment as a process of judgment embedded in a community of practice and to this purpose use the philosophy of inferentialism to unravel the judgment process of workplace educators by seeing it as an interrelated system of judgments, actions and reasons. Focussing on the unfolding of a process, we applied a longitudinal holistic case study design. Results show that educators are engaged in a constant judgment process during which they use multiple and adaptive frames of reference when forming their judgment about students. They construct an overarching image of students that develops throughout the placement, and their judgments about students go hand in hand with their actions relating to fostering independent practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In vocational education, students learn in different school-based and workplace-based learning environments and engage with different types of knowledge in these environments. Students are expected to integrate these experiences and make meaning of them in relation to their own professional knowledge base. This study focuses both on "what" types of knowledge students learn in these environments and "how" they integrate these different types of knowledge. Individual and group interviews were conducted with students, teachers and workplace supervisors in a vocational programme in the Netherlands. Results show that students recognise the importance of vocational knowledge learned in school-based learning environments while they are in the workplace and vice versa, and continuously contextualise knowledge to make it applicable for new circumstances. Also, students learn differently at school due to their experiences in the workplace.

The nature of knowledge in vocational education is often described in dichotomies such as theory versus practice or general versus specific. Although different scholars now acknowledge that vocational knowledge is more than putting bits of theoretical and practical knowledge together, it is still unclear how vocational knowledge should be theorised instead. In this article we theorise the idea of contextualising vocational knowledge to understand the nature of vocational knowledge and illustrate this process of contextualising with empirical examples from culinary education. We adopt an activity-theoretical focus on contextualising that involves both particularising and providing coherence. We posit a cognitive process of meaning making where meaning derives from seeing the relationships of parts to the whole. The aspects of the nature of coherence and the relation between concepts and actions seem rather underdeveloped in vocational education theory. To characterise this process at a micro-level, we enhance the activity-theory approach with an inferentialist one. Inferentialism offers a way to focus on reasons and inferential relations between concepts and actions that provides coherence in vocational knowledge. To characterise the broad spectrum of processes relevant for vocational knowledge, we propose the terms "conceptualising" and "concretising." Conceptualising involves inferring what follows from understanding a concept in a particular situation in relation to the meaning of other concepts. Concretising involves inferring what follows from understanding an aspect of the occupational practice in which students are participating. We argue that this way of framing vocational knowledge helps to better understand its nature and development.

Students in competence-based vocational education are expected to actively construct a personal professional theory, in which they integrate different types of knowledge and beliefs. Students' personal professional theories are seen as an important learning outcome of competence-based vocational education. However, it is unknown how personal professional theories can be measured. This study focused on measuring the content and nature of students' personal professional theories using a multi-method triangulation approach, in which 16 students in the domain of Social Work constructed a concept map, an interview and a self-report. The results show that the relatively structured methods (i.e., interviews and concept maps) reveal more insight into students' personal professional theories than less structured methods (i.e., self-reports). It is concluded that both structure as well as adequate prompts are important in the process of explicating personal professional theories. (Contains 6 tables, 2 figures and 1 footnote.)

In vocational education, students learn in different school-based and workplace-based learning environments and engage with different types of knowledge in these environments. Students are expected to integrate these experiences and make meaning of them in relation to their own professional knowledge base. This study focuses both on what types of knowledge students learn in these environments and how they integrate these different types of knowledge. Individual and group interviews were conducted with students, teachers and workplace supervisors in a vocational programme in the Netherlands. Results show that students recognise the importance of vocational knowledge learned in school-based learning environments while they are in the workplace and vice versa, and continuously contextualise knowledge to make it applicable for new circumstances. Also, students learn differently at school due to their experiences in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]