The long road from teacher professional development to student improvement: A school-wide professionalization on self-regulated learning in primary education

ABSTRACT

Notwithstanding the value of self-regulation, different studies evidence that self-regulated learning (SRL) is still insufficiently ingrained in schools and that teachers only rarely promote it among their students. Therefore, the current study reports on a one-year school-wide professional development programme (PDP). A quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test design was used with 10 schools randomly assigned to the experimental group (EG) and 10 schools to the control group (CG). To analyse how far the effects of the PDP reach, the impact on teachers’ SRL beliefs, self-efficacy, their SRL promotion behaviour and students’ SRL competences and achievement scores was investigated. Data were gathered from 40 fifth and sixth grade teachers (nEG = 22, nCG = 18) and their 747 upper primary school students (nEG = 448, nCG = 299). Analyses of covariance were used to study teacher-level effects, while multilevel analyses were adopted to investigate student-level effects. Results indicate that the PDP generated an increase in teachers’ SRL promotion, while no significant effect on their SRL beliefs and SRL self-efficacy could be found. Similarly, results overall indicate the absence of a desired intervention effect at the student level. Different explanations for the present results and recommendations for future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-regulated learning
• primary education
• professional development
• srl beliefs and self-efficacy
• srl promotion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. EFA analyses were conducted using maximum-likelihood extraction with oblimin rotation. Items with factor loadings below .30 and cross-loadings above .30 were eliminated during the analysis ((Tabachnick and Fidell 2001). Furthermore, two two-item scales (i.e. planning, persistence) were eliminated due to too low Cronbach’s alpha parameters.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [G.0198.15 N].

Notes on contributors

Sofie Heirweg

Sofie Heirweg, dr., is a former doctoral researcher at the Department of Educational Studies, Ghent University (Belgium). In her PhD, she focused on investigating upper primary school students’ self-regulated learning. At the moment, she is lecturer at HOWEST, University of Applied Sciences.

Mona De Smul

Mona De Smul, dr. , is a former doctoral researcher at the Department of Educational Studies, Ghent University (Belgium). In her PhD, she researched self-regulated learning at the teacher and school level. At the moment, she is a researcher at SODA+.

Emmelien Merchie

Emmelien Merchie, dr., is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Educational Studies, Ghent University (Belgium). Her main research interests include self-regulated learning, reading comprehension and visual literacy. 

Geert Devos

Geert Devos, Ph.D., is professor at the Department of Educational Studies, Ghent University (Belgium). He leads the research centre BELLON that studies educational policy and leadership in schools.

Hilde Van Keer

Hilde Van Keer, Ph.D., is professor at the Department of Educational Studies, Ghent University (Belgium). Her main research interests include innovative teaching methods in education, self- regulated learning and language didactics.