Professionals are increasingly involved in attempts to understand and address problems with wicked tendencies, which require crossing boundaries between disciplines, organisations and stakeholder perspectives. This multiple-case study investigated six higher professional education courses in order to develop better understanding of how teachers…

Meaning-making and sense-making are generally assumed to be part of students' personal vocational knowledge development, since they contribute to both students' socialisation in a vocation and students' personalisation of concepts, values and beliefs regarding that vocation. However, how students in vocational education acquire meaning and make…

Students in competence-based senior secondary vocational education are expected to actively construct personal knowledge during school-based learning and workplace learning. This study introduces the construct "personal professional theory" (PPT) to monitor and analyse students' personal knowledge development. It aims to investigate the…

This article discusses the way in which social identities structure the learning processes of students in two subjects in the Dutch secondary school curriculum--Care and Technology. It analyses interviews with 23 students and their teachers with a view to explaining the disappointing results in these subjects in terms of breaking through gender…

Examined effects of conceptually based instruction on development of students' procedural flexibility. Students in primary schools in the Netherlands participated in one of two instruction programs: the Realistic Program Design (RPD) or the Gradual Program Design (GPD). In both programs, conceptual understanding preceded procedural skill. However,…