ABSTRACT
One of the key tasks of teacher education is to support student teachers to develop a way of learning that enables lifelong learning (Hagger et al. 2008). In order to design teacher education programmes to foster this development, scientific knowledge is needed about student teachers' learning patterns, the influencing factors and how student teachers' learning patterns develop over time. Previous research on learning patterns has focused predominantly on understanding individual differences in academic learning in higher education contexts (Vermunt and Vermetten 2004). In this way, ‘academic’ learning patterns have been widely investigated in first year higher education contexts and to some extent in teacher education programmes (Donche and Van Petegem 2009). The vast body of research has indicated that these learning patterns are relatively dynamic factors and are influenced by several personal and contextual factors, which to some extent can explain why students' learning patterns can be adaptive across time (Donche et al. 2010; Richardson 2011; Vermunt and Vermetten 2004). Further details on this body of research can also be found in the preceding chapters of this monograph on student learning in higher education (see also Vanthournoutet al., this volume). In this chapter, we focus on students' learning patterns in teacher education programmes, which, in contrast with other university contexts and study programmes, have received far less attention.
