Motivational antecedents of Faroese student teachers’ time-on-task

Abstract

The Faroe Islands are a distinctive nation with its own language, which is consequently the most important language in schools. In this context, the Faroe Islands must train its own teachers and cannot rely to a meaningful degree on teachers trained in other countries. Faroese schools received a PISA shock after the millennium. As one of several measures, the teacher education institute was incorporated into the country’s sole university. Studies have indicated that the learning results are closely related to how much effort a student puts into the course and how effectively the student works with the learning material. Time-on-task in a teacher education program can be considered a coarse-grained measure of study intensity. The purpose of the present study is to explore factors that could explain Faroese student teachers’ time-on-task. The results show that it is their perceptions of the study requirements in teacher education that is most strongly related to time-on-task. Further, there is a tendency towards a weaker relation between self-discipline and time-on-task. A comparison with time-on-task in the other Nordic nations shows that time-on-task is somewhat low. If this is a problem, it might be important to increase the study requirements in Faroese teacher education.