44 Chapter 2 in profile 4 (practice-oriented) will be critical about its value for their future profession. Typically, teachers have multiple activities to choose from when designing their classes. By choosing and adapting activities that cater to different profiles, student engagement could be stimulated. When teaching a class, teachers could start a ‘meta-conversation’ to aid the learning of students, by acknowledging the different motives and preferences, and elaborating on the value of the learning activity for different students (the Q-set and Q-sorting procedure used in this study could be transformed into a learning activity for this purpose). Often when teachers introduce a learning activity, they do so briefly and get started. Not many teachers talk explicitly about how learning might take place. This leaves students to have to interpret the value of the activity for their learning. We propose that in the introduction of each class, teachers address the concerns and preferences of each profile by answering a few questions (figure 2.3). One important caveat: our proposal assumes sound basic course design principles, like constructive alignment, to be in place. Figure 2.3. Teachers’ aid for starting a ‘meta-conversation’ about active learning Strengths and limitations The use of Q-methodology allowed us to identify authentic viewpoints of medical students regarding small-group active learning. By interviewing first-year students at the start of the academic year, we have gained an in-depth understanding of students who enter medical school. Designing our study using the conceptual frameworks of active learning, epistemic beliefs, and approaches to learning allowed us to better understand the origins of the specific preferences of students and improves the generalizability of our findings. However,
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