Internships and Careers 2018 Abstracts
Practice makes perfect? A longitudinal case study of experiential learning among intermediate-level sports journalism students • Experiential learning is “learning in which the learner is directly in touch with the realities being studied. It is contrasted with the learner who only reads about, hears about, talks about, or writes about these realities but never comes into contact with them as part of the learning process” (Keeton & Take, 1978). One of the challenges of experiential learning is how to teach students to create professional-quality content, while encouraging them to think innovatively. In the following longitudinal case study, sports journalism students enrolled in an intermediate-level undergraduate reporting class (N = 198) were surveyed over the course of seven semesters in order to examine how incorporating outside publications into class objectives (e.g., student publication requirements) has shifted overtime, and this shift’s resulting ramifications. Data suggest students who worked with legacy media have had significant decreases in satisfaction with newspaper editors and willingness to recommend legacy media publications to students the following semester. This has led to less collaboration with local media outlets: Fewer students are spread around area news organizations and more students are publishing on the same, online-only platforms. Results suggest the best predictors of publication requirements fulfillment are timely responses from sources, overall satisfaction with the relationship with the editor, and the semester during which the course was taken.
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