Investigation of Prospective Teachers’ Self-Regulated Learning Skills in terms of Different Variables

Abstract

This study aimed to describe the self-regulated learning skills of prospective teachers studying at a public university in Istanbul and reveal their differences in relation to the components of these skills, namely motivation and taking action to learn, planning and goal-setting, strategy use and evaluation, and attachment in learning, as well as other variables, including their major, type of high school completed, age, gender, socioeconomic level and parents’ education level. It was also investigated whether there was a relationship between the participants’ self-regulated learning skills and their major and grade levels. The screening model was used in the research. The sample consisted of students studying at a public university in Istanbul in the 2018-2019 academic year and selected using the simple random sampling method. The participants comprised 926 first-, second-, third- and fourth-grade students attending the departments of computer education and instructional technology, classroom teaching, preschool teaching, mathematics teaching, science teaching, guidance and psychological counseling, Turkish language teaching, social studies teaching, special education, English language teaching, French language teaching, and German language teaching. The Self-Regulatory Learning Skills Scale (SRLSS) and a personal information form were used as the data collection tools. The findings of the research revealed that the prospective teachers had high scores in the subscales of SRLSS and the overall scale. It was concluded that the prospective science teachers had higher scores in planning and goal-setting than the students attending all other programs except for mathematics teaching. Furthermore, the scores of female prospective teachers in all subscales were higher than those of the male participants. Considering the type of high school, the participants that had completed basic high school scored higher in strategy use and evaluation compared to those that had finished other types of high school. When the prospective teachers’ self-regulated learning skills were analyzed according to their parents' education level, no significant difference was found. Keywords: self-regulated learning, prospective teachers, teacher education.