Teacher’s Self-Efficacy, Personality and Psychological Characteristics of the Situation – A Dynamic Approach

Short description of what will be presented during the seminar:

Teacher self-efficacy can be viewed as teachers’ evaluation of their own ability to achieve the desired outcome in terms of student engagement and knowledge acquisition. It is related to important outcomes, including teaching effectiveness (positive relationship), teaching quality (positive relationship), job satisfaction (positive relationship), and burnout (negative relationship).   

Although teacher self-efficacy is a dynamic construct, it has mostly been measured as a temporally stable construct or a trait, using cross-sectional and longitudinal designs with a small number of time points. However, the results of the few studies that utilized a dynamic approach to study self-efficacy show that the variability of teacher self-efficacy can be explained by both inter- and intra-individual differences.

Here we present results of the study conducted on the sample of 128 grammar school teachers in Croatia, with the goal to explore the relation between intra- and inter-individual differences in teachers’ personality and psychological interpretation of the situations that occur during the class, and teacher self-efficacy.  Results of the multilevel analyses point to the presence of dynamic interplay between inter- and intra-individual variability in personality and psychological characteristics of situation in explaining variability in teacher self-efficacy. Confirming that teacher self-efficacy should be studied both from the perspective of stable inter-individual differences and as a dynamic construct.

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