Calling Situated: A Survey Among Medical Students Supplemented by a Qualitative Study

Background calling within the medical context receives growing academic attention and empirical research has started to demonstrate its beneficial effects. The purpose of this study is to investigate what motivates students to enter medical school and what role calling may play (i), to evaluate if calling influences their perception of the learning context (ii) and to compare medical students’ experience of calling with those of physicians. Methods A questionnaire survey was distributed among medical students (N = 1048; response rate above 60%) of Lausanne University, Switzerland, supplemented by a group discussion between bachelor medical students (N = 8) and senior physicians (N = 4), focusing on different facets of calling. An existing data set of a survey among physicians, addressing calling with the same items, was used to compare students’ and physicians’ attitudes towards calling. Survey data were analyzed with the habitual statistical procedures for categorical and continuous variables. The group discussion was analyzed by means of thematic analysis. Results the survey showed that experiencing calling is a motivational factor for study choice and influences positively choice consistency. Students experiencing calling differed from those who did not : they attributed different definitions to calling, indicated more often prosocial motivational factors for entering medical school and perceived the learning context as less burdensome. The analysis of the group discussion revealed that calling is polysemous, fluid, conceived as having the characteristics of a double-edged sword and originating from within or outside or from a dialectic interplay between the inner and outer world. Finally, calling is experienced less often by physicians than by medical students, who experience calling in a decreasing prevalence with increasing immersion in the clinical years of the study of medicine. Conclusions calling plays an important role in study choice and consistency of medical students. Given its relevance for medical students and its ramifications with the learning context, calling should become a topic of the reflexive parts of the medical curriculum. We critically discuss the role played by calling for medical students and provide some perspectives on how calling could be integrated in the reflection and teaching on physician-hood.

“I Wanted a Profession That Makes a Difference”—An Online Survey of First-Year Students’ Study Choice Motives and Sustainability-Related Attributes

Higher education institutions are obligated to facilitate students in the development of sustainability competencies, which enable them to act as “change agents” in their future profession-specific environment. Therefore, students’ study motives, prior knowledge, attitudes, and experiences regarding sustainability should be considered when designing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) programmes. The present study compares first-year students in teacher training with first-year students in other study programmes and explores their study choice motives as well as sustainability-related conceptions, engagement and self-efficacy beliefs using a semi-standardised online questionnaire. Results show that the choice of study is dominated by intrinsic factors and the relevance of extrinsic factors differs by degree programmes with lower extrinsic values for the teacher training students. Regarding sustainability, we find simple and often unelaborated concepts. Teacher training students show significantly higher scores than non-teacher training students regarding the sustainability-related behavioural domain and self-efficacy beliefs. In addition, a gender gap increasing with age and with lower sustainability scores for older males could be identified but only for teacher training students. In conclusion, the results show valuable starting points as well as challenges that should be considered when designing target-oriented learning processes in (inter)disciplinary sustainability courses at higher education institutions.

Occupational structure of bearers of Jewish rabbinical, occupational and generic surnames

We study choice of profession in three groups of Russian-speaking Jewish families with different occupational distributions of the ancestors. This study continues exploration of the persistence of social status of families over centuries that was initiated in recent years. It was found previously that in some cases professions remain associated with the same surnames for many generations. Here the studied groups are defined by a class of the surname of individuals composing them. The class serves as a label that indicates a professional bias of the ancestors of the individual. One group are the bearers of the class of surnames which were used by rabbinical dynasties. The other group is constituted by occupational surnames, mostly connected to crafts. Finally, the last group are generic Jewish names defined as surnames belonging to neither of the above groups. We use the self-collected database that consists of 858 and 1057 of the first two groups, respectively, and 7471 generic Jewish surnames. The statistics of the database are those of individuals drawn at random from the considered groups. We determine shares of members of the groups working in a given type of occupations together with the confidence interval. The occupational type’s definition agrees with International Standard Classification of Occupations. It is demonstrated that there is a statistically significant difference in the occupational structure of the three groups that holds beyond the uncertainty allowed by 95% confidence interval. We quantify the difference with a numerical measure of the overlap of professional preferences of different groups. We conclude that in our study the occupational bias of different population groups is preserved at least for two centuries that passed since the considered surnames appeared.

Occupational structure of bearers of Jewish rabbinical, occupational and generic surnames

We study choice of profession in three groups of Russian-speaking Jewish families with different occupational distributions of the ancestors. This study continues exploration of the persistence of social status of families over centuries that was initiated in recent years. It was found previously that in some cases professions remain associated with the same surnames for many generations. Here the studied groups are defined by a class of the surname of individuals composing them. The class serves as a label that indicates a professional bias of the ancestors of the individual. One group are the bearers of the class of surnames which were used by rabbinical dynasties. The other group is constituted by occupational surnames, mostly connected to crafts. Finally, the last group are generic Jewish names defined as surnames belonging to neither of the above groups. We use the database that consists of 858 and 1057 of the first two groups, respectively, and 7471 generic Jewish surnames. The statistics of the database are those of individuals drawn at random from the considered groups. We determine shares of members of the groups working in a given type of occupations together with the confidence interval. The occupational type’s definition agrees with International Standard Classification of Occupations. It is demonstrated that there is a statistically significant difference in the occupational structure of the three groups that holds beyond the uncertainty allowed by 95% confidence interval. We quantify the difference with a numerical measure of the overlap of professional preferences of different groups. We conclude that in our study the occupational bias of different population groups is preserved at least for two centuries that passed since the considered surnames appeared.

The Student Study Experience – Analysing Student Study Choices

As higher education institutions increasingly teach online and offer greater levels of choice to students (over which modules to study, in which order to study, and how long to extend study before qualification) new challenges are introduced. One of these challenges is how to maintain an understanding of the student experience. This understanding is necessary to provide feedback to both students and faculty, and institutionally for the continued enhancement of quality. This paper is the first attempt at providing a narrative describing one approach to this challenge and the experience within a large distance learning University. It demonstrates a new approach to data is key to enabling the analysis of student study pathways. For many years, this University has offered great flexibility of study and as wide a study choice as it is possible to offer with conventional modules. By design, the Institution holds high levels of data for all student study. However, whilst it is possible to create bespoke queries, we found that this has been insufficient to readily enable analysis of the student experience. By moving from a traditional relational database structure to a multi-model database, many of the difficulties are resolved. In this paper, we report on this approach and describe next steps, including the potential to apply machine learning algorithms and test other data theories like that of Markov Chains.