16 Chapter 1 the likelihood of a deeper quality of student learning. In contrast, educators with teaching-centred beliefs focus only on the content and are less aware of the student’s learning process. In addition to the two arguments described above, Schweisfurth32 provides two further arguments for why learning-centred beliefs are preferred in contemporary education. The first is an economic argument that states that students must develop higher-order skills such as critical thinking, flexibility and creativity in order to become and remain as competitive as possible in an ever-changing world. The second is an emancipatory argument that states that learning-centred education is a way of reducing the traditional power distance between teacher and student and thus contributes to a more equal, democratic and diverse society. In our view, both additional arguments are specifically relevant in the medical education context: the fast-changing and expanding medical scientific knowledge and availability of the internet and artificial intelligence as novel tools and sources of information demand that students develop these higher-order skills. Moreover, through a more equal relationship between teacher and student, a core competence such as collaboration can possibly be promoted, and in parallel also contribute to the development of a more equal and collaborative doctor-patient relationship. Beliefs about teaching and learning in the medical education research literature Studies exploring medical educators’ beliefs about teaching and learning are limited.14,19,26,48,53-56 Moreover, most of these studies were not specifically executed in learning-centred education context. One of the few studies which explored medical educators’ beliefs about teaching and learning in learning-centred curricula is that of Jacobs et al.14,56 who developed the ‘COLT’ (Conceptions Of Learning and Teaching) questionnaire. The COLT represents a novel, validated questionnaire for measuring educators’ conceptions of learning and teaching in a learning-centred medical education context, and includes a ‘teaching-centredness’ scale. However, this instrument is less suitable for obtaining a more detailed understanding of the content of learning-centred beliefs. In addition, the eight items measuring teachingcentredness are all cognitive, thus providing no further insights into affective aspects of beliefs, which we expect to be highly relevant. Therefore we aimed to explore the beliefs about teaching and learning of medical educators working within a learning-centred education context in a further qualitative study.
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