The purposes of the present study were to (a) further examine the four-dimensional factor structure of the Predicting Learner Advancement through Cooperative Education (PLACE) (Parks, 2003; Parks, Onwuegbuzie, & Cash, 2001) scale with student interns and cooperative education (co-op) students from the University of Florida and (b) determine if the predictor variable set of salary, length of internship/co-op, academic credit, and grade point average explain variance in perceived learning during the internship or cooperative education experience. The revised version of the PLACE scale included rating-scale items and open-ended questions related to students’ work skills development, career development, academic functions and personal development to determine whether internships and cooperative education impact student learning outcomes.

An exploratory factor analysis indicated that 26 of the 29 scale items were salient at the .5 level across the four subscales. Coefficients alpha for scores on the four factors — personal development (α = .96), career development (α = .91), work-skills development (α = .70), and academic development (α = .74) — yielded estimates of reliability.

A canonical correlation analysis was used to test relationships between student perceived learning as measured by the PLACE subscales and the predictor variables of salary, length of experience, grade point average and academic credit. Of all four roots, only root 1 (R_c = .473; R_c² = .223; df = 16) was statistically significant (p < .05) and accounted for an appreciable amount (i.e., 22%) of correlation between the two variable sets. For canonical root 1, the work skills development subscale most clearly defined the predictor variable composite, while salary most clearly defined the composite variable for the criterion variable set.

The means and standard deviations were analyzed for all four subscales, and it was determined that interns and cooperative education students perceived the most change on the Career Development subscale (M = 2.36, SD =1.03). In addition, content analysis indicated that students found the real-world experience/exposure to be the most meaningful aspect of their experiences (n = 59) and described the tasks that were unrelated to their field/major to be the least meaningful aspect of their experiences (n = 54).