Text

theses

Formalization of continuing professional education is intended to keep workforce current with economic, social, technological, and environmental changes; however, it has had a number of unintended and negative effects: decrease in student motivation and engagement, limited pedagogical experience of instructors, lack of accountability and proper assessment. Lack of unifying standards, the short-term format of the programs, and a lack of resources needed to evaluate learning outcomes makes adequate assessment of continuing professional education problematic. This research explores alternative method that can be used to assess such programs. In the absence of measures of learning outcomes, evaluating student learning strategies and motivation to learn can be a useful proxy for assessing student learning outcomes and teaching quality in continuing professional development programs. This mixed methods study with approximately 400 students from a continuing professional program utilizes multiple surveys and observations to identify student level of motivation and the use of learning strategies. To obtain rich and in depth data about the program, this research employs a person-centered approach to motivation-learning strategy clusters as a composite measure of these highly interdependent indicators. The quality of motivational orientation is related to the choice of learning strategies used by students (Entwistle, et al., 1979). Findings of this study indicate that students of the researched program formed four motivational clusters with 70% of students reporting high level of intrinsic and high quality extrinsic motivation. However, high motivation clusters reported higher use of not only deep, but also surface learning strategies. Correlating students’ personal characteristics with individual learning strategies did not produce meaningful results. Analyzing data on professional motivation demonstrated that students are mostly intrinsically motivated and their professional motivation should have a positive influence on motivation to engage in learning activities. These results can be used to expand the current knowledge on motivation and use of learning strategies in mandated continuing professional programs. Further, this study demonstrated the successful use of motivation-learning strategies clustering as a proxy method to assess learning outcomes and teaching quality in short-term continuing professional programs. Finally, based on the results of the study recommendations for instructional and organizational changes in the program are presented.

ETD_8268

Ed.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Olga Chaban

doi:10.7282/T3WQ06V3

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.