In the past decade there has been a growing appreciation of the importance of student learning environments in medical education. In 2013, the UK General Medical Council (GMC) developed a discussion paper on Approving Educational Environments (GMC, 2013). As part of the GMC’s 2015 revision of this document, it included a definition of an education or learning environment:

The educational or learning environment can be defined in various ways. At its simplest it can mean the physical surroundings within which learning takes place, such as access to library facilities, seminar rooms or simulation equipment. However, references to the environment generally also encompass broader and less tangible notes of educational “climate”, “culture” or “ethos”. (GMC, 2015, p. 3)

This GMC paper also points to the American Medical Association (AMA, 2008) definition of the learning environment as:

A social system that includes the learner (including the external relationships and other factors affecting the learner), the individuals with whom the learner interacts, the setting(s) and purpose(s) of the interaction, and the formal and informal rules/policies/norms governing the interaction. (GMC, 2015, p. 3)

Further, the AMA describes a learning environment as “comprising three broad components in any institution or setting: institutional culture, curriculum (both formal and informal) and educational climate” (GMC, 2015, p. 3).

Some organizations have been more specific in their definition of the learning environment. For example, the GMC’s 2015 publication Promoting Excellence: Standards for Medical Education and Training devotes the first of its five themes to “Learning Environment and Culture” and includes the following standards:

Standard 1: The learning environment is safe for patients and supportive for learners and educators. The culture is caring, compassionate and provides a good standard of care and experience for patients, carers and families.

Standard 2: The learning environment and organisational culture value and support education and training so that learners are able to demonstrate what is expected in good medical practice and to achieve the learning outcomes required by their curriculum. (GMC, 2015, p. 7)

Given these definitions, how can we delineate such a broad and multifaceted aspect of a social organization as its learning environment? Specifically, how can this be done for the learning environments of veterinary medical education?

Like all professions, veterinary science is a social organization. In Lave and Wenger’s (1991) terminology, it is a community of practice in which veterinarians acquire the learning, meaning, and identity of a specific profession by participating in its learning communities. In veterinary medical education, these learning communities could include preclinical groups, clinical groups in veterinary teaching hospitals, as well as external placements, e-learning groups, or groups formed through continuing education.

Wenger (1999, p. 4) suggests that participation in learning communities such as these “refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities.” Merton and Kitt (1950, p. 81) hypothesized more than 60 years ago that learning communities such as medical schools are social structures, and that it should be possible to delineate “the development of relatively precise, statistical indices of social structure” in such a social organization. In his classic study of the “student-physician,” Merton suggested in 1957:

Learning to be a physician, like complex learning of other kinds, is not only a function of intelligence and aptitude, of motivations and self-images; it is also a function of the social environments in which learning and performance take place.… Learning and performance vary not as the individual qualities of students vary but also as their social environments vary, with their distinctive climates of value and their distinctive organization of relations among students, between students and faculty, and between students and patients. (Merton, 1957, p. 63)

The neo-Mertonian field of analytical social science “endeavours to explicate iterative connections between the properties of a social system and the action of individuals” (Freese, 2009, p. 94). That is, it should be possible to delineate aspects of a social system such as the educational environment or climate through mixed qualitative and quantitative methods in order to describe and analyze them.

In an effort to apply qualitative and quantitative methods, several psychometric tools have been developed to assess the learning environment. Each of these tools is focused on a specific stage within the professional curriculum.