Preparation for Practice by Veterinary School: A Comparison of the Perceptions of Alumni from a Traditional and an Innovative Veterinary Curriculum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alumni survey research can tap users' perspectives on an educational product and thereby provide valuable information for outcomes assessment aimed at improving the quality of educational programs. The study documented here compared the perceptions of two groups of alumni from two curricula offered by the same veterinary school, where the traditional lecture-based curriculum had been gradually replaced by a reformed, more student-centered curriculum. Year 1 of the new curriculum started in 1995, while the old curriculum continued to be delivered to the entering class of 1994. The aim of our study was to determine whether the new program received more positive evaluations from the alumni and whether it was perceived as offering better preparation for veterinary practice. A questionnaire was sent to all alumni who had graduated in the period 2001--2003. Compared to alumni of the traditional program, alumni of the new curriculum reported higher perceived competence levels for clinical knowledge and skills (specific competencies) and for communication skills and academic skills (generic competencies). Alumni of both programs attributed difficulties in the transition from university to work to lack of experience with practical or technical skills and with primary-care cases. They suggested that more attention be paid to these aspects of practice and to practice/business management and communication with clients. The concrete changes in the curriculum appear to have had a noticeable positive effect, without the feared detrimental effect on knowledge acquisition. The results point to further program improvements, particularly for practice-oriented specific and generic skills.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".