Students’ Understanding and Uses of Self Regulated Learning in the Bahraini Educational Environment

Abstract

Self-regulated learning helps individuals to shape and develop their academic personality, take control of their own learning and be responsible for their behaviours and actions. It has been considered that self-regulated students are high achievers as they are purposeful, reflective, self-initiators and selfmotivators. They set their own goals and perform in a specific manner toward achieving their assigned goals. More importantly, self-regulated learning has been proposed to critically affect teachers-students authority relationships by increasing individuals’ awareness of their rights and duties in the classroom. However, from my learning experience as a Bahraini student, the Bahraini educational environment does not provide students the opportunities to express their opinions and be free-minded in the classroom. They cannot ‘be’ in the way that they dream of seeing themselves. Schools and teachers’ authority is one of the factors that inhibit students from being autonomous and having their own academic identity. Also, school curricula and assessment processes play a role in forcing the students to follow their teachers’ thoughts and to be compliant with their authority. Thus, the central concern of this thesis is to understand students’ thinking in the Bahraini educational environment: who they are, what they aspire to, whether they are capable of taking control of their own learning, what prevents them from being self-independent learners and why Bahraini classrooms would benefit from educational programmes that emphasise self-regulated learning. Methodologically, this research qualitatively examined self-regulated learning in Bahraini secondary schools. Individual interviews were conducted with ten secondary school students of both genders between 17 and 18 years old. A thematic analysis approach was used to analyse the collected data and the results show that Bahraini students’ learning is crucially influenced by educators’ authority which mainly shapes students’ thinking and perspectives on education. Generally, most of the students who took part in this study did not emerge as selfdirected learners and their learning opportunities are restricted by a knowledgetransmission curriculum. Consequently, a number of implications were discussed and recommended in order to improve learning and teaching processes in the Bahraini educational environment.