Pre-service Teachers’ Motivational Orientations and the Impact of Self-Regulated Learning on their Academic Achievement: A Mixed Method Study.

Abstract

This convergent parallel mixed methods study investigated pre-service teachers’ motivation and self-regulation learning and its impact on their academic achievement during their professional training in colleges of education. In addition, the contributory factors of beliefs and values that lay behind some pre-service teachers’ motivational orientations were examined through episodic narratives. The multi-stage sampling technique was used in selecting 500 teacher trainees from 40 residential colleges of education in Ghana and data sources included surveys, archival and interview data. The results from the study indicated that taken as a set, the motivation component of pre-service teachers’ self-regulation learning construct mediated the relationship between prior performances (entry aggregates) and academic achievement (GPA). The learning strategies component intervened significantly in the influence of prior performance on academic achievement. In the final model, prior performance showed a moderately large indirect effect on academic achievement through ten out of the fifteen variables of the self-regulation learning construct. The research findings indicated that desirable attributes such as critical thinking, metacognitive strategy use, and students’ value for task on the courses on the teacher training programme were non-existing and did not predict pre-service teachers’ academic performance in college. The pre-service teachers’ narratives suggested that family members and friends, instead of candidates themselves, played a significant role in their choice of colleges of education for training and accordingly the teaching profession; motivation was principally external and teaching was mainly perceived as a means of imparting knowledge to young ones. However, participants held some positive values such as recognizing diversity among children, collaborating with parents to achieve optimal learning for children and holding high the ethical principles of the teaching profession. This study provides an ecological and empirical foundation for the specification and explanation of the theoretical connections between pre-service teachers’ prior attainment, motivational orientations and self-regulation learning strategy use and their academic achievement in professional training context.