Exploring subject-specific variations in teachers’ promotion of self-regulated learning: insights from classroom observations, teachers’ self-reports, and students’ perceptions

Teachers play a crucial role in fostering students’ self-regulated learning (SRL) skills in the classroom. Previous research indicates that teachers adopt diverse approaches to promoting SRL, but empirical evidence on subject-specific differences remains limited. This study examines the extent to which native language and science teachers promote SRL and whether their approaches differ. To explore teachers’ SRL promotion, we analysed video recordings of their classroom behaviour, their self-reported SRL promotion, and students’ perceptions of their teachers’ SRL promotion. The study involved 28 teachers and 515 students, with data collected at two measurement points. Analyses of observational and questionnaire data revealed that teachers of both subjects promoted SRL predominantly implicitly, focusing mainly on metacognitive and cognitive strategies, while emotional regulation strategies were largely neglected. Overall, SRL promotion was implemented only to a limited extent and occurred similarly across subjects. Although comparisons of several direct and indirect SRL promotion approaches indicated some variation, no systematic subject-specific differences emerged. Moreover, correlations between the three perspectives, observations, teachers’ self-reports, and students’ perceptions, were generally low, suggesting that each perspective captures distinct and complementary aspects of SRL promotion. Taken together, these findings indicate that variation in SRL promotion may be more strongly related to individual teacher characteristics, task characteristics, or lesson type than to the subject domain. Future research on potential differences in SRL promotion would benefit from adopting multi-perspective approaches to gain a more comprehensive understanding of SRL in classroom practice, as well as from incorporating systematic variation in the observation of SRL over longer periods.