Key words: undergraduate medical education, self-regulated learning, professional identity formation, teacher-centred learning, culture

"Contextual attributes fostering self-regulated learning in a teacher-centered culture: learners’ professional identity formation is a trigger"

Clinical knowledge is rapidly advancing. Medical professionals need to update their knowledge autonomously throughout their lives. “Self-regulated learning” has come to be an important competency in the lives of medical professionals. Probably because of the teacher-centred educational culture in East Asia, including Japan where this research was conducted, passive and less-strategic learning still prevails.

The central theme of this thesis is how to address the challenge of self-regulated learning by medical students in teacher-centred contexts. We explored contextual attributes which could foster self-regulated learning, and established a practical scheme to trigger self-regulated learning by applying these contextual attributes to it.

The results showed that learning contexts which allow for self-reflection based on individual identity with concrete future self-images promote self-regulated learning skills. “Professional identity formation,” defined as the formation of a representation of self, achieved in stages over time during which the characteristics, values, and norms of the medical profession are internalised, might play a pivotal role in fostering self-regulated learning in a teacher-centred context. 

Funded by JSPS Kakenhi and the Japan Medical Education Foundation