| Parallel to a student's sense of efficacy for learning is a teacher's sense of efficacy for teaching. The purpose of this study is to better understand the influences on and outcomes of teachers' sense of efficacy. More specifically, this study examined the teacher characteristics of teaching experience, instructional level and professional development and their relation to teacher efficacy. The relations between teachers' sense of efficacy and the teacher behaviors of student engagement, instruction, and learning environment were also examined.; The sample (N = 891) was drawn from a large southeast Texas suburban district. Participants in this study completed several demographic questions as well as the Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001), a 24-item Likert-type scale that was divided into three scales representing three different dimensions of teacher efficacy (i.e., efficacy for student engagement, efficacy for instructional strategies, and efficacy for classroom management), and a self-report measure of teacher behaviors.; Results from multivariate analyses of variance showed that there were group differences among instructional level and years of experience with respect to teachers' sense of efficacy. These analyses indicated that teachers with more years of experience tended to report higher levels of teacher efficacy. They also indicated that teachers at younger instructional levels tended to report higher levels of teacher efficacy. Next, multiple regression analysis was employed to explain the variance in teacher behaviors using the three teacher efficacy variables as the predictors. These analyses indicated that efficacy for instructional strategies was a significant predictor for all five teacher behaviors and efficacy for student engagement was a significant predictor for three of the five teacher behaviors.; The present study adds to previous findings by using a much larger sample and a more updated and differentiated instrument of teachers' sense of efficacy to study the relation between teacher characteristics, efficacy and behaviors. Results of this study allow researchers to more fully understand the motivation and teaching processes as well as establish a more concise theory of the antecedents and outcomes of teacher efficacy. |
