Teacher Trainers as Action Researchers: Scrutinizing the Reasons for Student Failure (original) (raw)

This action research aims to identify the teacher trainees’ attributions for their failure, their locus of control and their achievement goals as a result of high failure rate in “Teaching English to Young Learners” course at a large state university in Turkey. For this purpose, qualitative and quantitative data were gathered via an attribution questionnaire, locus of control (LOC) scale, and interviews. The 35-item attribution questionnaire was developed by the researchers and consisted of four parts investigating student, instructor, course, and exam related reasons. The student related reasons had also four sub categories such as study skills, critical thinking ability, in-class performance/attendance and group work performance/attendance. The questionnaire also had an open-ended part with the same categories. The overall reliability of the questionnaire was found to be .80 and .77, .78, .70, .81 for respective sub-groups. The participants were also given a LOC scale and finally ...