Association of Pre-Service Teachers' Performance, Personality, and Beliefs with Teacher Self-Efficacy at Program Completion.

Abstract

Introduction With teacher turnover costing the U.S. as much as $7 billion per year (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 2007), and the continuing demand for qualified teachers, it is imperative for schools to increase retention rates among their faculty (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003). Retention efforts are especially important among novice teachers, those who are in the first five years of their teaching career, because they leave the profession at higher rates than their more experienced counterparts (Keigher, 2010; Ingersoll, 2003). In the more challenging early years of teaching, novice teachers with a higher sense of teacher self-efficacy are more likely to persist and stay in the profession (Knobloch & Whittington, 2002). This suggests the importance of self-efficacy as a target for growth during teacher preparation, but little is known about how teacher self-efficacy develops in those who are just starting their careers. Traditionally, self-efficacy has been conceived not as a stable trait, but as a situationally bound construct based on information which is being drawn from a particular context (Bandura, 1986). Among new teachers who have spent little time in the classroom, self-efficacy is likely driven by a combination of factors, including experiences and skills in the classroom, knowledge of content and pedagogy, attitudes, and personal dispositions (Bandura, 1997; Gist & Mitchell, 1992; Woolfolk & Hoy, 1990). This study will address the gap which exists in our current understanding of pre-service teachers' self-efficacy development by examining the joint contribution of pre-service teachers' observed performance during student teaching, and more stable personal features of their personality and beliefs about how children learn, to their teacher self-efficacy upon completion of a teacher preparation program. Teacher Self-Efficacy--Definition and Developmental Mechanism Teacher self-efficacy is defined as a teacher's belief in his or her ability to complete the steps required to accomplish a particular teaching task in a given context (Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy, & Hoy, 1998). From this definition, it must be noted that self-efficacy is not an actual measure of competence, but a sense of confidence in, or future-oriented perception of, the competence one might expect to display given a certain set of circumstances (Hoy & Spero, 2005). Teacher self-efficacy is conceptualized as a unified higher order construct encompassing the more specific domains of self-efficacy of instructional strategies, self-efficacy of classroom management, and self-efficacy of student engagement (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001). Bandura (1993) suggests that people with a low sense of efficacy in a given situation fall easy victims to stress and depression because they take difficult tasks and their perceived inability to deal with them personally. People with high self-efficacy treat difficult tasks as an opportunity for mastery, attributing failure to a lack of effort or skills, both of which are in their hands to correct (Bandura, 1993). This sense of control allows them to quickly recover their feelings of self-efficacy after a setback. Keeping this model in mind, we can establish the importance of equipping pre-service teachers with a high sense of efficacy, so that they may persist through the challenges of the induction year. Since the construct of self-efficacy was introduced, compelling evidence has emerged linking teacher self-efficacy to numerous important teacher outcomes. Greater self-efficacy has been associated with teachers' expressed professional commitment for both pre-service teachers (Evans & Tribble, 1986) and in-service teachers (Coladarci, 1992), with teachers who have higher self-efficacy saying they would once again choose teaching as a career if given the choice. Teachers with high self-efficacy are also more likely to stay in teaching once they have entered the field (Burley, Hall, Villeme, & Brockmeier, 1991), and teachers who leave the teaching field have been found to have significantly lower teacher self-efficacy than even those in their first year of teaching (Glickman & Tamashiro, 1982). …