An Exploration of Causal Attributions of Teacher Educators: A Single Case Study

In this study, an academic’s who has been employed in a foundation-supported university teaching barriers and accompanied attributional reasoning were examined in the context of his belief system with regards to learning, teaching and knowledge. This study is a basic naturalistic inquiry. By means of qualitative data gathering and analysis, it was aimed at estimating how the relation between teaching barriers and attributional reasoning was influenced being held pedagogical-epistemological belief system of the academic. Qualitative data was collected through two different semi-structured interview protocols and gathered data was analysed with an inductive and interpretivist manner. The scholar’s beliefs system’s divergences (teacher-centred vs. learner-centred) allowed to explore the presumable relation of barrier-attribution in the context of pedagogical-epistemological belief system. It was detected that the academic held a more teacher-centred pedagogical belief system. In this context, it was also detected that the academics was liable to make attributions to overly external, non-controllable and stable factors in illuminating her barrier-attribution relation. Major outcomes of the study are evaluated by means of psychological (i.e., attribution theory) and instructional (pedagogical-epistemological beliefs) lenses and suggestions are offered in the context of higher education.