What is educational climate?

When students enter a new learning institution, they become aware of the curriculum they will follow through various explicit means such as the course syllabi, the classes they attend, the examinations they prepare for. The teachers, of course, should be well aware of the curriculum they are expected to teach through the course documentation and through faculty meetings and discussions. In some cases the curriculum is developed by the institution itself; in others it is mandated by external authorities, or even is taught as part of a national curriculum. In addition to the documented curriculum, students and teachers both become aware of the ‘educational environment’ or ‘climate’ of the institution. Is the teaching and learning environment very competitive? Is it authoritarian? Is the atmosphere in classes and field placements relaxed or is it in various ways stressful, perhaps even intimidating? These are all key questions in determining the nature of the learning experience. What some researchers refer to as the ‘press’ in the academic and social environment of the institution can vary from course to course within the curriculum, even from class to class. These expectations can be perceived as either formal or informal components of the educational experience—and they can vary from individual to individual. They can be motivating—or demotivating. Individual students may respond differently to these subtle elements in their learning experience. If we can identify the elements operating in the educational environment or climate of a given institution or course, and evaluate how they are perceived by students and teachers, we have the basis for modifying them to enhance the learning experience in relation to our teaching goals. Several research groups over the years have attempted to identify and quantify the presence and impact of rather intangible aspects of a learning environment: the climate, or atmosphere, or ethos, tone or ambience, the culture or personality of the institution. Just as there is a ‘sick building syndrome’ there could be a ‘sick learning environment’. Jack Genn surveys these and many other important aspects in his paper in this issue. Perhaps one reason why the study of learning environments in health professions such as medicine has been of increasing interest in recent years is the growing diversity of the student population. We can no longer assume that we are teaching young people just out of secondary education. The move to mature entry in several countries may mean that we have to teach differently. Kick et al. (2000) have begun to study the perceived learning environment needs of mature students at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. There may also be gender differences in preferred learning environments that will become increasingly apparent now that many institutions have a more equitable gender balance in their student populations. Carol Gilligan and Susan Pollak (1988) commented more than a decade ago that “The increasing number of women entering the medical profession prompts a rethinking of medical education. Like the canaries taken into mines to reveal the presence of unseen dangers, women medical students in their heightened sensitivity to detachment and isolation often reveal the places in medical training and practice where human connection has become dangerously thin”. Perhaps the study of learning environments can help us to begin to explore those places. And although we have seen many studies of the learning needs of socially disadvantaged minorities who seek access to medical schools and other health professions institutions, we have not yet really looked at their needs from the educational environment once they succeed in getting admitted. Another variable that is apparent from the work that has been done recently, e.g. Pololi and Price’s (2000) development of an instrument to measure the learning environment as perceived by undergraduates in an American medical school and similar work done by the present writers with the help of postgraduate research students (Roff et al., 1997) is the level or stage that the learner is at in the curriculum. Firstand second-year students have different perceptions of the desirable learning environment than do those in the clinical years. Undergraduate students’ perceived needs are different from those who are newly graduated and in their first year of practice. Even within the first 2 or 3 years of postgraduate training, we begin to see that the mature learner wants progressively different types of teaching and learning—and environments. Data that we have begun to collect from Scottish postgraduates suggest that the new practitioner wants progressive degrees of autonomy in his or her learning environment, but at the same time wants to be able to reach out to more competent and experienced supervisors when he/she needs to. We have also looked at the question of whether it is possible to develop a universal ‘culture free’ inventory to measure the quality of the educational environment for the health professions. Our Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure (DREEM) (Roff et al., 1997) is being used in a dozen countries in medical schools, nursing colleges