Linking Teacher Efficacy and Responsibility With Teachers' Motivational Styles and Student Engagement

• In Event: 34.035 - Teachers' Motivations and the Classroom: Relations Across Diverse Educational Contexts

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
Teachers’ instructional practices and motivational styles are a key pathway through which teachers’ motivations may influence students. For instance, teachers who feel efficacious towards influencing students’ educational outcomes, and who are willing to assume personal responsibility for doing so, are assumed to be comparatively more supportive and caring towards students, and to continuously strive towards high(er) quality instruction (Lauermann, 2015; Watt, Richardson, & Smith, 2017). Based on self-determination theory, teachers’ instructional behaviors can be described along a continuum from highly autonomy-supportive (reflecting a concern with individual student needs and adaptive teaching) to highly controlling (reflecting external regulation of students and disregarding student needs; Reeve et al., 2004). Teacher-rated autonomy-support has been linked to both teacher efficacy and responsibility (Berger et al., 2013; Holzberger et al., 2013; Oser, 1991). However, whereas students’ reports of autonomy-support are a strong and positive predictor of student motivation, the analogous associations with teacher-reported practices are often weak or nonsignificant; teachers’ and students’ reports are often only weakly-to-moderately related; and there can be substantial differences in students’ ratings of the same teacher (e.g., Wagner et al., 2016). These challenges can obfuscate the associations between teacher motivations and student outcomes, and warrant further attention. Accordingly, we examined the links between (1) teacher- and student-reported autonomy-support vs. controlling practices, and their associations with (2) teachers’ motivations (efficacy and responsibility) and (3) indicators of student engagement.

Methods
Survey data were collected from 96 Swiss vocational teachers and their 1300 students (13.58 students per class, on average; mean age = 19). About 51% of the teachers were teaching an academic (vs. vocational) subject, had an average of 12 years of teaching experience, and 41% were female. All scales and sources are reported in Table 6.

Results and Discussion
First, student reports of teaching practices were reliable (ICC(2) ≥ .86), and between-classroom differences accounted for 32% to 35% of the total observed variance in these practices (Table 6; Figure 2). Second, systematic between-classroom differences in indicators of student engagement accounted for 10% to 23% of the total variance in engagement. Third, a multi-level structural equation model (shown in Figure 3) supported a weak-to-moderate positive association between teacher- and student-reported autonomy-support and no significant association for reports of controlling practices. Teacher efficacy and responsibility were both positively linked to teacher-reported autonomy-support but were not significantly related (directly or indirectly) to student-reported practices (Figure 3). Student-reported autonomy-support was the only significant predictor of student engagement.

These analyses support a path from teachers’ motivations to teacher-reported practices, but did not support a direct or indirect link to student-reported practices. Notably, students in the present sample were quite consistent in evaluating their teachers’ practices, so that our findings are not likely to be due to lack of reliability. This study adds to a growing body of research suggesting that teachers’ motivations may be well suited to predict teachers’ instructional beliefs and professional commitment (Lauermann, 2015) but their links to observable instructional practices are less clear (meta-analysis for self-efficacy: Kuusinen, 2016).

Authors

• Fani Lauermann, University of Dortmund

• Jean-Louis Berger, Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training