What 560 Hungarian Teachers Reveal About Building Learning Habits in First Graders

The first year of primary school is when children learn how to learn, and a new large-scale study from Hungary suggests that what teachers believe about learning habits may matter even more than how long they have been teaching. A research team led by Andrea Anikó Bencéné Fekete, Tun Zaw Oo, Judit Podráczky and Krisztián Józsa surveyed 560 Hungarian first-grade teachers to understand which classroom practices they use to build children’s learning habits, how often they use them, and how important they consider them to be. The findings, published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, reveal a striking alignment between teachers’ beliefs and their actions, and point to qualifications and attitudes, rather than experience or school location, as the key drivers of habit-building practice.

Learning habits are the routines and methods children use to acquire and process information, from organizing their schoolbags and following daily schedules to working in groups, self-assessing their progress and communicating with peers. Psychologists have long argued that habits form through repetition: from a behavioral perspective, behaviors repeated consistently in a given context become automatic; from a cognitive perspective, repeated actions create implicit memory associations between responses and settings; and from a social perspective, the family, classroom and peer environment shape which behaviors get practiced at all. Because first grade is the period when these patterns are first established at school, the researchers focused on the teachers who orchestrate that crucial year.

To measure teachers’ practices, the team developed a Learning Habit Assessment Inventory of 50 items covering ten domains: teacher attachment, classroom attachment, community and peer relations, study environment, learning strategies, routines and schedules, responsibility, motivation, self-assessment, and parent-related habits. Teachers rated each item twice, once for how frequently they practice it and once for how important they believe it is, using five-point scales. The instrument was refined through expert content validation and administered online over eight weeks during the 2023–2024 academic year, reaching teachers across villages, small towns and larger towns in Hungary. Of 600 teachers contacted, 580 responded and 560 complete datasets were retained, a response rate of more than 93 percent.

The psychometric work behind the study was extensive. Exploratory factor analysis identified a stable nine-factor structure, explaining roughly 55 percent of the variance in frequency ratings and nearly 60 percent in importance ratings. Confirmatory factor analysis then verified that the same 46 items fit both the frequency and importance scales, with fit indices meeting accepted thresholds. Internal consistency was high, with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.954 for frequency and 0.926 for importance, and both convergent and discriminant validity were confirmed. Crucially, multi-group analyses showed the instrument measures the same constructs across teachers of different experience levels and across school contexts, meaning future comparisons between these groups can be made on solid statistical ground.

So which habits do Hungarian first-grade teachers actually prioritize? Rasch analysis with Wright maps showed that the most frequently practiced and most highly valued items were strikingly consistent. Setting up permanent spaces for learners’ tools and equipment in the classroom topped both lists, as did developing an in-term reward system discussed with pupils, using stickers, stars, certificates or similar incentives. At the other end, the least practiced and least valued items included teaching pupils how to use a home assignment notebook and caring for a class pet or flower together. In other words, teachers practice most often exactly what they consider most important, a tight coupling between belief and behavior that ran through nearly every analysis.

Repeated-measures analyses confirmed significant differences in how the nine habit domains were rated, accounting for around 71 percent of variance in frequency and 78 percent in importance. One intriguing paradox emerged: parent-related practices were performed frequently, yet teachers rated them as less important than routines or motivational strategies. The authors suggest this may reflect institutional pressures, since some activities are mandated by school policies or curriculum guidelines regardless of teachers’ personal pedagogical judgments, while practices seen as highly valuable, such as fostering self-assessment or deeper parental involvement, may require time and resources that are not always available.

Perhaps the most surprising result concerns experience. Teachers were grouped into low (under 15 years), medium (15 to 30 years) and high (31 years and above) experience categories, yet no significant differences emerged in how frequently they practiced learning habits overall, nor in how important they considered them. The single exception was responsibility-related habits, which less experienced teachers rated as significantly more important than their more seasoned colleagues did. Similarly, school context, whether village, small town or big town, made almost no difference, with the sole exception of classroom attachment habits, which village schools practiced more often, possibly reflecting the closer relationships typical of rural communities.

When the researchers turned to prediction, structural equation modeling identified only two significant predictors of how often teachers practiced learning habits: their qualifications and their perceptions of importance. Perceived importance was by far the stronger predictor, with a standardized coefficient of 0.647, while qualifications contributed a smaller but significant effect. Gender, teaching experience and school location all failed to predict practice frequency. A hierarchical regression showed that the full set of predictors explained about 42 percent of the variance in practice frequency, and a two-way analysis revealed a significant interaction: the effect of teachers’ importance attitudes on their practices depends on their qualification level.

The implications reach well beyond Hungary. If teachers’ beliefs about the value of learning habits so strongly shape what they actually do in the classroom, then professional development programs should target those beliefs directly, helping teachers recognize and enact evidence-based habit-building strategies such as fostering student responsibility, self-assessment and family collaboration. The finding that qualifications interact with attitudes suggests that training may be most effective when it builds on teachers’ existing educational foundations. Policymakers, the authors argue, should also create structures that support communication and shared responsibility between teachers and parents, especially given the paradox that parent-related practices are common but undervalued.

The study is not without limitations. It relied on teachers’ self-reports at a single point in time, so causal conclusions cannot be drawn and social desirability bias cannot be ruled out. The sample was nearly 95 percent female, mirroring the Hungarian primary teaching workforce but limiting generalizability, and the inventory was designed specifically for first grade. The authors call for longitudinal and observational studies to verify whether self-reported beliefs translate into observed classroom behavior, and for cross-cultural comparisons to test whether the belief-practice link holds in other educational systems. Still, with a validated instrument now available, researchers have a new tool for probing one of the most consequential questions in early education: how the adults in the room quietly shape the habits children will carry for the rest of their schooling.

Subject of Research: Teachers' classroom practices and beliefs in supporting first graders' learning habit development in Hungary

Article Title: Teachers’ practices in supporting the learning habits of first graders in Hungary

Article References: Fekete, A. A. B., Oo, T. Z., Podráczky, J., & Józsa, K. (2026). Teachers’ practices in supporting the learning habits of first graders in Hungary. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00048-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00048-7

Keywords: learning habits, first grade, teachers' practices, Hungary, primary education, teacher beliefs, psychometrics, questionnaire validation, structural equation modeling, classroom routines, teacher qualifications, early childhood education