Original version
The Teacher Education Advancement Network Journal. 2023, 162-173
Abstract
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. Adequate time-on-task is crucial for student teachers because it allows them to develop their teaching skills, build strong relationships with students, adapt to classroom challenges, and ultimately become more effective educators. It is a critical component of their teacher preparation and development. 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. 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. 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.