Abstract
Senior secondary vocational education needs to deliver reflective practitioners who possess an adequate knowledge base, who are able to solve complex problems and who have the ability to acquire and develop new knowledge during their further professional career. It is assumed that all types of knowledge, despite their different content
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and nature, need to be internalized into a personal professional knowledge base. This personal professional knowledge base is defined as a student’s personal professional theory (PPT). A PPT consists of a combination of knowledge and beliefs and serves as a frame of reference through which students acquire and interpret knowledge. Moreover, PPTs direct, to a more or lesser extent, professional behavior. The development of PPTs is a process of internalization and socialization, that entails the absorption and personalization of shared knowledge and common values, norms and beliefs of a certain vocational community and through which students’ develop a sense of belonging and commitment to that community. PPTs need to be analyzed by their content as well as their nature. The content of a PPT is divided into six objects, namely: technical-instrumental processes, target group, vocational domain, organizations, social environment and professional development). The nature of PPTs is described by qualities, which are properties of personal knowledge. Four qualities are distinguished, namely: concreteness, complexity, richness and vocational specificity. Four authentic and empirical research questions are derived from the problem definition, namely: 1) What are the main features of PPTs?, 2) How can the content and nature of students’ PPTs in vocational education be measured?, 3) How do the content and nature of students’ PPTs develop during learning in the school and at the workplace?, and 4) Can specific guiding activities of vocational educators stimulate the development of students’ PPTs? One theoretical and three empirical studies were conducted. Different mixed-method designs are used to gain in-depth insight into how PPTs can be measured, how they develop and how this development can be stimulated. The results show that: 1) students need structure and adequate prompts to explicate and articulate their PPTs, 2) PPTs have a relatively stable nature, but a changeable and dynamic content, 3) the development of PPTs is characterized by replacement, encapsulation of knowledge and thematic turbulence and 4) high level interactions and contingent modeling of vocational educators are needed for stimulating the development of PPTs. It is concluded that explicit attention to the internalization of knowledge into a PPT is crucial, since such a knowledge base determines, to a more or less extent, the way how new information is stored. In this way, ‘developing a knowledge base’ still remains a challenge for researchers, educational designers, vocational educators and students
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