Getting the Most Out of Every Training Day – A Diary Study on the Influence of Instructors on Self-Regulated Learning During Firefighter Leadership Courses

This is the online supplement for a diary study on self-regulated learning in firefighter leadership courses and how it is susceptible to instructor behavior.

Leadership courses in the fire services are highly challenging, up to the point that they can seriously exhaust the trainees and hamper their self-regulated learning efforts (e.g., setting goals, focusing attention, seeking feedback). We theorize that experiences of failure or overload can curtail trainees’ available energy resources on subsequent training days, which in turn should affect trainees’ learning efforts. Given the central role of instructors in leadership courses, we hypothesize that supportive and humble instructor behaviors decrease experiences of failure and overload, and thus increase self-regulated learning. Moreover, we argue that supportive instructor behavior fosters the learning-promoting effect of high levels of energy resources among trainees, while humble instructor behavior mitigates hampering effects of low levels of resources. We conducted a preregistered diary study with 118 firefighters who participated in two-week leadership courses at a German fire academy. The participants completed short questionnaires before and after classes each day. Multilevel analyses confirmed that perceived daily supportive and humble instructor behavior predict trainees’ reports of daily self-regulated learning activity. Notably, this effect was independent of positive effects of trainees’ reported resources in the morning. However, supportive and humble behavior did not moderate the effect of energy resources. Our results suggest that instructors can elicit effective learning despite challenging training conditions. Furthermore, this study offers implications for leaders in the fire services who themselves often conduct trainings with their subordinates.

The study was approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Psychology & Sports Science of [anonymized for review] and pre-registered with Aspredicted.org (see https://aspredicted.org/DM2_78R).

This online supplement includes

• a codebook describing all instructions and items
• raw data (anonymised) and analysis script (Note: The raw data contains only the information of persons who were included in the analysis and have agreed to it.)
• supplemental analyzes