Working to learn and learning to work: placement experience of Project 2000 nursing students in Scotland

It is evident that the Scottish colleges have designed and provided very different curricular arrangements to support students' learning to practise in placements. Evaluation has demonstrated that some of these arrangements are of fundamental importance in facilitating or constraining the educational experience of students, including opportunities for reflection on experience, students' preparation for placements, the role of tutors in students' placement learning, the preparation of mentors and the utility of instruments for the assessment of students' practice-based learning. In addition to the formal provision in support of students' learning to work, students have developed their own informal strategies in order to meet their (sometimes conflicting) needs to maximize practical learning opportunities, ease entry into the nursing team and achieve favourable assessment of learning. Some of these involve working in order to learn. This paper is based on the work of the National Board-funded Evaluation of Project 2000 in Scotland (1992-96). The remit of the evaluation was to examine the teaching/learning processes of the Project 2000 nursing programmes and the new midwifery programmes, and their relationship to the educational outcomes for individual students, giving particular emphasis to the experience of students.