Embedded Parallel Practice: A Result of Divergence Between Exam Requirements and Clerkship Content

Transitioning from being a student to becoming a professional is challenging even though medical education provides periods of clinical practice and clerkships to support the transfer between university and the future work as a doctor. Using an ethnographic approach, we investigated how medical students navigated their clerkship in psychiatry. We applied the concepts from situated learning in the analysis of students’ navigation of discrepancies between course requirements and clerkship routines. The analysis shows different ways of navigating the clerkship, which all beget a parallel practice embedded in the clinical setting, where students choose to engage in tasks that directly prepare them for the university exam. The parallel practice is counterproductive for the student’s development of a professional identity, which is an important element of transitioning from being a student to becoming a medical doctor. Therefore, it is imperative to consider, if this undermines the university’s ambition of delivering doctors prepared for clinical practice.