Self-regulatory skills and the role of part-time working in student teachers

Background and aims The teacher shortage is a common problem internationally (den Brok et al., 2017; Sutcher et al., 2019) – and also in Switzerland. To counter this problem, student teachers are encouraged to work as teachers during their studies. Public concerns were raised about whether teacher students are sufficiently prepared for teaching. We investigate whether part-time working students differ from non-working student teachers in self-regulated learning (SRL) skills which might help them jump-start their professional development. We hypothesize that student teachers with a particular skill set self-select into part-time work. Methods 108 students filled out an online questionnaire on metacognitive self-regulation and 68 on time management and effort regulation. All scales stem from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ, Pintrich et al., 1991). We used confirmatory factor analysis to validate the scales. Further, multiple-indicator-multiple-causes (MIMIC) models were used to analyse the effects of working status and two control variables (age and institute of study) on the three latent SRL constructs. Results Working status is a significant and the most consistent predictor for all three SRL scales. The model fit for metacognitive self-regulation was problematic but good for time management and effort regulation. Conclusions The concern of whether the part-time working student teachers are sufficiently prepared for their jobs might be mitigated by the argument that those students who choose to work parttime have higher self-regulated learning skills and might thus acquire faster the necessary professional skills that it takes to become good teachers.