Examining the Relations Between Teaching Experience, Teacher Self-Efficacy, Motivational Strategy Use, and Job Satisfaction

• In Event: Exploring the Situated Nature of Teachers’ Ability-Related Beliefs, Classroom Practices, and Well-Being

Abstract

Aims/Background
Teachers’ perceived self-efficacy has been shown to predict a broad-range of outcomes, including the quality of classroom instruction and job satisfaction (Zee & Koomen, 2016). However, much of this research has tended to operationalize teachers’ beliefs as a general construct. Even when researchers have examined separate dimensions of teacher efficacy as unique predictors of classroom practices, they have not always selected practices to focus on that are more conceptually aligned with one dimension of efficacy than with another.
The present study addresses these limitations by examining whether teachers’ beliefs about their ability to motivate their students when teaching mathematics (i.e., their motivational efficacy) are a better predictor of their use of motivational strategies than their efficacy beliefs about their ability to support students’ cognitive processing (i.e., their cognitive efficacy). We also examined whether teachers’ motivational strategy use potentially mediated the associations between each type of efficacy and job satisfaction. Finally, because there have been mixed findings regarding predictors of teacher efficacy (e.g., Klassen & Chiu, 2010; Lauermann & König, 2016), we examined the relations between teachers’ years of teaching experience and each type of efficacy.

Method
We analyzed data from the 4th-grade U.S. math teachers who participated in the 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Of the 540 teachers in the sample, we focused on the 479 (407 female; over 92% of participants were between 24 and 60 years of age; mean years of teaching experience = 13.19) who provided responses to the measures of interest (see Table 1 for a list of items and covariates). The preregistered analysis plan can be found at https://osf.io/bxn75. For relevant deviations from this plan, see the table and figure notes.

Results/Discussion
In line with our expectations, the CFAs depicted in Figure 1 indicated that a model including two types of efficacy fit the data better than did a model including a single, general efficacy factor (see Table 2). A subsequent SEM analysis (see Figure 2a) indicated that, contrary to our hypotheses, participants’ years of teaching experience were linearly (rather than curvilinearly) related to both types of teacher efficacy, and the magnitude of this relation was similar for the two types of efficacy. However, consistent with our expectations, teachers’ motivational efficacy yielded a stronger positive correlation with their use of motivational strategies than did their cognitive efficacy. Because the model exhibited problematic levels of multicollinearity (due to the high correlation between types of efficacy), we examined two additional models (depicted in Figures 2b and 2c), each of which included only one of the efficacy factors. Across these models, we found that the coefficient for the path from motivational efficacy to motivational strategy use was substantially larger than the path from the cognitive efficacy to strategy use. In addition, although the overall associations between each type of efficacy and teachers’ job satisfaction were similar, the indirect effect from motivational efficacy to strategy use to job satisfaction was slightly larger than the corresponding path involving cognitive efficacy (though both paths were significant).

Authors

• Soyoung Kim, Boston College

• RoseMarie Rohrs, Boston College

• David B. Miele, Boston College