Extensive knowledge integration strategies in pre-service teachers: the role of perceived instrumentality, motivation, and self-regulation

This study investigated contributions of pre-service teachers' endogenous and exogenous instrumentalities, their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and their use of self-regulation strategies to explain the extent to which they used strategies to purposefully integrate their knowledge across courses (extensive knowledge integration). With a total of 254 pre-service teachers' survey-responses, results of a hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that their endogenous instrumentality of their current coursework (i.e. seeing their course work as instrumentally connected to their future careers), their use of metacognitive strategies and their use of deeper cognitive learning strategies (e.g. elaboration and critical thinking) contributed to explaining their use of extensive knowledge integration strategies for completing coursework. Our results suggest that to develop pre-service teachers' teaching expertise, they may need to (a) have a strong understanding that the current course content and their future goals are instrumentally linked, (b) be able to initiate planning and self-monitoring for learning and (c) use strategies for deep learning that integrates their knowledge across courses.