Teaching and learning in clinical placements: associations of supervision and learning opportunities with placement experience in NETS 2025

Background Clinical supervision and access to learning opportunities are associated dimensions of the clinical learning environment. Their associations with perceived placement experience are relevant to organizational review of educational quality. This study examined associations among three National Education and Training Survey (NETS) 2025 indicators using a workplace learning affordances perspective. Methods We analyzed public organization-level aggregate scores from the NETS 2025 reporting tool. An extraction audit during revision corrected incomplete pagination and compressed-value decoding errors in the initial extract. The corrected dataset included 743 reporting organizations with complete Supervision, Teaching & Learning, and Overall Experience scores. Ordinary least squares models used HC3 robust standard errors. A theory-informed statistical decomposition estimated an indirect association, with percentile confidence intervals from 10,000 organization-level bootstrap resamples. Sensitivity analyses examined boundary scores, influential observations, additional indicators, respondent-count weighting, minimum respondent counts, and clustering. Results Supervision was positively associated with Overall Experience (B = 0.838, 95% CI 0.794–0.883) and Teaching & Learning (B = 0.789, 95% CI 0.742–0.835). Teaching & Learning remained associated with Overall Experience after adjustment for Supervision (B = 0.375, 95% CI 0.306–0.443). The indirect association was 0.295 (bootstrap 95% CI 0.240–0.351), or 0.314 after standardization (95% CI 0.258–0.367). The outcome model had R 2 = 0.837 and adjusted R 2 = 0.836. Sensitivity estimates remained positive but varied in magnitude. Conclusions Organizations with higher supervision scores also had higher perceived teaching and learning quality and overall experience scores. The cross-sectional decomposition identifies a positive indirect component whose magnitude varies across specifications. These findings support reviewing supervision, access to learning opportunities, and overall experience as a connected profile when interpreting organizational survey feedback. These organization-level associations do not establish individual-level effects or causal mediation.