The quality of student teachers' self-regulated learning in a dual learning environment

Teacher education is more and more organized in dual learning programmes in which two types of learning environments are combined: studying at the university and learning from practice in schools. These programmes call upon a high degree of self-regulated learning (SRL) in student teachers. However, it is unclear whether student teachers are willing and able enough to regulate their learning processes to this extent, as well as how educational institutes can stimulate the development of this way of learning. This study examined the quality of student teachers’ SRL. Twenty-eight students of a post-graduate academic teacher education programme participated. To measure the quality of self-regulation student teachers were interviewed about their learning and regulation conceptions and they were asked to describe six learning experiences and corresponding regulation activities in an open question log. Phenomenographically informed content analysis of 133 learning experiences identified a set of categories of description of the reported regulation activities. These descriptions differed significantly from the accounts of SRL found in academic student learning contexts. Homogeneity analysis and cluster analysis revealed four qualitatively different approaches to SRL to teach. These were described in a model, which could be helpful in teacher education for diagnosing student teachers’ quality of self-regulated learning. The results showed that combining learning from experience with learning from university courses put special demands on the nature and quality of self-regulated learning that students were not used to cope with. Possibilities to improve the development of student teachers’ SRL will be discussed.