Abstract:

Teachers' beliefs influence the instructional practices used in teaching, and hold an essential role in adopting specific teaching methods and strategies. Teachers have an essential role in the development of students' self-regulated skills. For students to become self-regulated learners, they need to have opportunities to control and monitor their learning process. This study focuses on the relationship between teachers' beliefs about self-regulated learning and the opportunities they create in the classroom context to develop and use self-regulated learning skills. We hypothesized that teachers' beliefs about self-regulated learning will predict the extent to which they create classroom opportunities for students to develop their self-regulated learning skills. 120 pre-university teachers filled in two online self-assessment scales: the Self-Regulated Learning Teacher Belief Scale and the Self-Regulated Learning Opportunities Questionnaire. The first scale (Lombaerts and colleagues, 2009) is a self-reported one and assesses teachers' beliefs about self-regulated learning. The second self-reported measure, the Self-Regulated Learning Opportunities Questionnaire (Vrieling, Bastiaens, and Stijnen, 2012) assesses the opportunities that teachers create for students, in classroom, to develop their self-regulated learning skills. Results show that teachers' beliefs about self-regulated learning predict the extent to which they create classroom opportunities for students to develop their self-regulated learning skills. Teachers' beliefs about self-regulated learning seem to play an important role in teaching practices that promote the development of self-regulated learning skills, and they also might hold an essential role in the training programs focused on the development of self-regulated learning.

Keywords:

Preuniverisity teachers, self-regulated learning, classroom, undergraduate students.