Measuring students’ self-regulated learning in professional education: bridging the gap between event and aptitude measurements

Quality & Quantity, Aug 2015

Self-regulated learning has benefits for students’ academic performance in school, but also for expertise development during their professional career. This study examined the validity of an instrument to measure student teachers’ regulation of their learning to teach across multiple and different kinds of learning events in the context of a postgraduate professional teacher education programme. Based on an analysis of the literature, we developed a log with structured questions that could be used as a multiple-event instrument to determine the quality of student teachers’ regulation of learning by combining data from multiple learning experiences. The findings showed that this structured version of the instrument measured student teachers’ regulation of their learning in a valid and reliable way. Furthermore, with the aid of the Structured Learning Report individual differences in student teachers’ regulation of learning could be discerned. Together the findings indicate that a multiple-event instrument can be used to measure regulation of learning in multiple contexts for various learning experiences at the same time, without the necessity of relying on students’ ability to rate themselves across all these different experiences. In this way, this instrument can make an important contribution to bridging the gap between two dominant approaches to measure SRL, the traditional aptitude and event measurement approach.

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Measuring students’ self-regulated learning in professional education: bridging the gap between event and aptitude measurements

Qual Quant Measuring students' self-regulated learning in professional education: bridging the gap between event and aptitude measurements Maaike D. Endedijk 0 1 2 Mieke Brekelmans 0 1 2 Peter Sleegers 0 1 2 Jan D. Vermunt 0 1 2 Maaike D. Endedijk 0 1 2 Peter Sleegers 0 1 2 0 Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge , 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ , UK 1 Department of Education, Utrecht University , P.O. Box 80140, 3508 TC Utrecht , The Netherlands 2 Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente , P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede , The Netherlands Self-regulated learning has benefits for students' academic performance in school, but also for expertise development during their professional career. This study examined the validity of an instrument to measure student teachers' regulation of their learning to teach across multiple and different kinds of learning events in the context of a postgraduate professional teacher education programme. Based on an analysis of the literature, we developed a log with structured questions that could be used as a multipleevent instrument to determine the quality of student teachers' regulation of learning by combining data from multiple learning experiences. The findings showed that this structured version of the instrument measured student teachers' regulation of their learning in a valid and reliable way. Furthermore, with the aid of the Structured Learning Report individual differences in student teachers' regulation of learning could be discerned. Together the findings indicate that a multiple-event instrument can be used to measure regulation of learning in multiple contexts for various learning experiences at the same time, without the necessity of relying on students' ability to rate themselves across all these different experiences. In this way, this instrument can make an important contribution to - bridging the gap between two dominant approaches to measure SRL, the traditional aptitude and event measurement approach. 1 Introduction During the past decades, research on self-regulated learning (SRL) has increased enormously and different models have been developed to conceptualize SRL. Although research has shown that SRL has benefits for academic performance (Cantwell and Moore 1996; Vermunt 2005) and expertise development (Zimmerman 2006), studies also found that students have problems regulating their own learning and that the development from students towards self-regulating professionals does not occur naturally (Evensen et al. 2001) . To support students to become self-regulated learners during their professional career, valid instruments are needed to assess the self-regulation strategies students use during their learning (Boekaerts and Cascallar 2006) . Research on SRL conducted so far has mainly focused on students’ SRL in schools for primary and secondary education (Boekaerts and Corno 2005) . As a consequence, most of the available instruments to assess student SRL have been developed in traditional school settings to examine the benefits of SRL for academic learning. Far less research has been conducted on how student teachers regulate their learning to teach in postgraduate professional teacher education programmes where two types of learning environments are often combined: a traditional school setting (university) and a professional workplace (practice school) where student teachers do their internship (Endedijk et al. 2012, 2014; Endedijk and Bronkhorst 2014) . Moreover, the few available studies into student teachers’ regulation of learning, focused on how student teachers regulate their learning while following a course at the university, rather than how they regulate their learning from practice (e.g., Corrigan and Taylor 2004; Ja¨rvenoja and Ja¨rvela¨ 2009) . As learning at the workplace is less intentional and planned, does not have pre-set objectives or identifiable outcomes, and is more contextual and collaborative than academic learning (Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2005; Tynja¨la¨ 2008) , student teachers need to learn different regulation skills to prepare themselves for further professional learning. For example, student teachers need to learn to plan and design their own learning tasks and environment during their internship at the practice school, besides only learning to regulate well-designed and structured learning tasks during their courses at the university (Niemi 2002). In regulating their own learning to teach, student teachers are thus confronted with multiple and different kinds of learning events as part of their professional training. In order to assess SRL of student teachers, a valid instrument that can deal with the large diversity in learning contexts, but also can discern different qualities of students’ regulation of professional learning is needed (Endedijk et al. 2012) . This study makes a contribution to this line of research by examining the validity of an i (...truncated)


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Maaike D. Endedijk, Mieke Brekelmans, Peter Sleegers, Jan D. Vermunt. Measuring students’ self-regulated learning in professional education: bridging the gap between event and aptitude measurements, Quality & Quantity, 2016, pp. 2141-2164, Volume 50, Issue 5, DOI: 10.1007/s11135-015-0255-4