The influence of student teacher self-regulation of learning on their curricular content-knowledge and course-design skills

Abstract

This investigation examined the influence of EFL student teacher self-regulation of learning (SRL) on their curricular content-knowledge and course-design skills. Positivism guided this study at the levels of: ontology (one form of reality); epistemology (detachment from the subjects); and methodology, using nomothetic research strategy (causal comparative), instruments (questionnaires and tests) and data analysis techniques (planned and post-hoc ANOVAs and post-hoc tests of multiple comparisons). Results contradicted mainstream research on SRL since no differences were found between the low, average and high SRL groups in their curricular knowledge and course-design skills. The low achieving group included similar proportions of low, average and high SRL students; so did the average and high achieving groups. The study cast doubts on current SRL self-reporting measures and recommended think-aloud techniques for assessing student SRL while performing actual tasks. The study standardised an achievement test that professionals could use to measure curricular content-knowledge and course-design skills and proposed a new method for determining the weight of test objectives.

Keywords:

• cognitive strategies
• curricular content-knowledge
• foreign language teaching
• metacognition
• motivation
• self-efficacy
• self-regulated learning
• test construction

Notes

1. Split-half, Kuder-Richardson and Cronbach's alpha all check internal consistency and require running instruments once. However, Kuder-Richardson and Cronbach's alpha differ from split-half in not splitting instruments into two halves. Moreover, Kuder-Richardson suits dichotomous items only (e.g. yes/no questions), whereas Cronbach's alpha better checks the variances of multiple-choice items, which is the case of the test items in this study.