Students' development in self-regulated learning in postgraduate professional education: a longitudinal study

Abstract

One of the tasks of postgraduate education is to develop students' conceptions and skills necessary for lifelong learning in their profession. Therefore, this study aimed at identifying students' development in self-regulated learning throughout a postgraduate teacher education programme. A longitudinal design with three measurement occasions was adopted. Student teachers' learning orientations were measured with a questionnaire and their regulation activities by means of multiple structured question logs. Longitudinal multilevel analyses showed that student teachers became more passive in their regulation throughout the programme. Furthermore, only one third of the student teachers changed in the direction of independent meaning-oriented learning. This study found little evidence that student teachers became more self-regulating throughout the postgraduate professional programme. This shows that opportunities for directing one's own learning might be a necessary but not a sufficient condition to increase students' conceptions and skills to become self-regulated lifelong learners.