Current Issues in Education > Volume 6, 2003 > Number 11

Citation Information

Nietfeld, J. L. and Cao, L. (2003, June 19). Examining instructional strategies that promote pre-service teachers' personal teaching efficacy. Current Issues in Education [On-line], 6(11). Available: http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume6/number11/

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Examining Instructional Strategies that Promote Pre-Service Teachers' Personal Teaching Efficacy

John L. Nietfeld
North Carolina State University

Li Cao
State University of West Georgia

Abstract

This study examined changes in personal teaching efficacy (PTE) by pre-service teachers in relation to various instructional strategies used in a college course. PTE was assessed at the beginning and end of the course, and students were asked to rate which instructional strategies had the greatest impact on their PTE and learning. Results indicated that students perceive more active instructional strategies as being most beneficial to their PTE. Classroom performance was correlated with PTE at the end but not at the beginning of the course. Students high in PTE at the end of the semester were more likely to report specific instructional strategies as being beneficial to their PTE than their low PTE counterparts indicating an awareness of the strategies that facilitated their gains.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Method
• Subjects
• Materials
• Procedure
• Results
• Reliability Analyses
• Descriptive Statistics
• Correlational Statistics
• Research Questions
• Discussion
• References

Introduction

The effectiveness of teacher education programs at changing student beliefs and ensuring a deep understanding of pedagogical knowledge is mixed at best (Borko & Putnam, 1996). One of these beliefs that warrants continued investigation is self-efficacy for the teaching process. In particular, it is important that teacher-training courses instill a sense of personal efficacy through the strategies and instruction they provide. To do this effectively we need to begin to critically examine specific instructional strategies that promote development of teacher efficacy.

Self-efficacy has been defined as a judgment of one's ability to perform a task within a specific domain (Bandura, 1997). The concept of teacher efficacy was established in the field of research 20 years ago by the RAND organization. Teacher efficacy can be described as the teacher's belief that he/she has the ability to organize and execute courses of action required to successfully accomplish a specific teaching task in a particular context (Tschannen-Morgan, Hoy, & Hoy, 1998). After two decades' efforts, progress has been made both in theory and research on this construct. These advances have brought to light the importance of not only considering the ability level of an individual but also the individual's belief that they will succeed on a task.

Gibson and Dembo (1984) built upon the RAND studies and Bandura's work to develop a reliable measurement of teacher efficacy. Application of Bandura's theoretical underpinning to the construct of teacher efficacy led to uncovering an important distinction between general teaching efficacy (GTE) and personal teaching efficacy (PTE) (Gibson & Dembo, 1984). General teaching efficacy refers to confidence in the profession as a whole to play an important role in student motivation and performance. Personal teaching efficacy refers to the teacher's belief in their ability to implement effective teaching strategies and to effect positive change in student learning. The development of PTE expanded the concept of teacher efficacy on a more personal level to include a belief in one's ability to teach effectively, as well as a belief in positive outcome expectancy from effective teaching.

Since the mid-1980s, Gibson and Dembo's work has inspired a considerable amount of research on PTE. Ghaith and Yaghi (1997) found that the more teaching experience teachers in their study had, the less likely they were to implement new instructional methods in their class. However, they also found that those with higher levels of PTE were more likely to incorporate new instructional methods. A later study found that highly experienced teachers who also had high PTE were more confident in their abilities to teach than beginning teachers and those with a low sense of personal efficacy (Ghaith & Shaaban, 1999).

Recent research also shows that the varieties of specific instructional methods incorporated in the classroom are affected by PTE as well. An investigation of the factors influencing pre-service teachers' variation in use of instructional methods revealed that teachers with little to no experience with a specific teaching method, resulting in lower rating of PTE, were less likely to implement new teaching methods into their classrooms (Gerges, 2001). More specifically, PTE has been found to be linked to in-service elementary and secondary school teachers' instructional experimentation, including willingness to try a variety of materials and approaches, the desire to find better teaching strategies, and implementing alternative methods (Allinder, 1994).

The above findings indicate that there is a mixed relationship between teaching experience and personal teaching efficacy, but that personal teaching efficacy is positively related to teachers' willingness to improve teaching and their teaching practice. These findings provide support to the assertion that perceived self-efficacy is a strong predictor of behavior (Bandura, 1997) and has significant implications for the development of teacher education programs. Recent research indicates that PTE can be improved through participating in student teaching experience (Shields, 2000), staff development workshops and classroom activities (Fritz, & Miller-Heyl, 1995), using cross group feedback, a new teaching technique while monitoring a class (Ryan & Ratliffe, 2000), participating in teacher efficacy research (Henson, 2001), and having success in high quality science courses and workshops, access to resources and time, and supportive colleagues and administrators (Ramey-Gassert, Shroyer, & Staver, 1996).

Recent research has also looked into the process of developing teacher efficacy. For instance, Herbert, Lee, and Williamson (1996) reviewed the literature and suggested that inclusion of long-term mentor-prot‚g‚ relationship could result in beginning student teachers' greater teacher self-efficacy. Woolfolk (2000) found that PTE and GTE both rise for pre-service teachers during their preparation program and student teaching but then drop during their first year of teaching. After two decades' efforts, the theoretical work and applied research on teacher efficacy has made significant progress in defining the construct, developing instruments to measure the construct, and investigating relationship among teacher efficacy, teacher characteristics, and teaching practice. Investigations are now moving toward examining the process of developing teacher efficacy through different ways. Yet, the issue of how instructional practice in teacher education programs contributes to teacher efficacy remains unaddressed.

The goal of this study is to gain insight into the specific instructional strategies that provide the greatest influence on students' PTE in teacher training courses. We believe this study will provide some information about teaching practices that will allow us to investigate more complex factors such as how increased PTE leads to skill in classroom monitoring and reflective teaching practices. The procedure for this study involved measuring students' PTE at the beginning and end of an educational psychology survey course. In addition, we gathered information on what classroom instructional strategies students perceived to be most beneficial to their PTE and learning outcomes. This information allowed us to examine changes in PTE from the beginning to the end of the semester and how these changes related to instructional strategies and classroom performance. The educational psychology course was chosen because it is a starting point for students to gain knowledge and develop a basic understanding of the process of learning and teaching through the discussion of topics such as learning, motivation, instructional strategies, and assessment. Exposing students to a variety of research-based theories and instructional strategies will give them the opportunity to develop a mental model of the teaching process. This model will provide them with a framework to transfer their pedagogical knowledge to their specific content-based methods courses and their future classroom. Our primary research questions were

1. What instructional strategies used in our educational psychology courses are most beneficial to increasing PTE?
2. How do students high in PTE differ with students low in PTE in terms of what instructional strategies they see as most beneficial to them?
3. Is there a relationship between instructional strategies that strongly impact learning and those that strongly increase PTE?
4. How do instructor differences affect PTE?

Method

Subjects

The subjects included 140 students enrolled in an introductory educational psychology course at a mid-size university in the South. The students were primarily juniors and seniors enrolled in the teacher education program. There were 114 females and 26 males. The students were recruited on a voluntary basis from four different sections of the course. One instructor taught two of the sections and a different instructor taught another two.

Materials

Subjects were administered a 20-item inventory called the Teacher Efficacy Scale (Gibson & Dembo, 1984; Woolfolk & Hoy, 1990). This inventory measures the two independent factors Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE) and General Teaching Efficacy (GTE). PTE is comprised of 12 items while GTE is comprised of eight items.

Procedure

The students completed the Teacher Efficacy Scale during the first major content unit of the semester. The topic of self-efficacy was not covered during this unit. During the final week of class students were asked to first retake the Teacher Efficacy Scale and secondly to provide feedback regarding instructional strategies used during the course. Students began the feedback process by rating the extent to which different instructional strategies in the course impacted their PTE. The instructions were as follows:

Please rate your agreement on the extent to which each of the following instructional strategies in this course impacted your Personal Teaching Efficacy in this course.

Student ratings for each instructional strategy were assessed using a 6-point Likert scale ranging from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree." After completing these questions for PTE the students completed the same questions with regard to their learning. The directions for the Likert-response questions read as follows:

Please rate your agreement on the extent to which each of the following instructional strategies in this course impacted your Learning in this course

The following instructional strategies were assessed: lecture, focus group discussion, reading the textbook, completing a schema representation project, course website, textbook website, whole group discussion, use of video in the classroom, peer collaboration/tutoring for classroom learning, and in-class illustration exercises. The focus groups consisted of watching a segment from a video or reading a short article on a class topic or timely educational issue, and then forming small groups to discuss particular questions raised in the video or article or to do further problem solving related to the topic. Both of the instructors in this study used a total of ten focus group sessions during the course of the semester that lasted approximately forty-five minutes apiece. The schema representation project is a holistic performance assessment aimed at having students make explicit what they believe to be the factors important for successful classroom instruction. The project is completed on a posterboard wherein a creative representation, personal examples, and interconnections between concepts are required (Nietfeld, 2002). Students did not know their score on the schema project before the second assessment of PTE. Peer collaboration was informal study groups or assistance initiated by the students outside of the class. In-class illustration exercises consisted of active applications of course concepts during the class period. These exercises were typically short in duration, lasting approximately three to ten minutes apiece, but were used throughout the semester. One example is Sperling's timed sensory memory tasks that we recreated in Powerpoint and had students try out and then discuss the implications of that topic for classroom instruction (Sperling, 1960).

Personal teaching efficacy was covered during the middle of the course and was a topic that the students were prepared to comment on by the time they completed the questions at the end of the semester. In addition, a description of PTE stated as "your belief about yourself as a teacher to have a positive impact on student learning" was included as a prompt at the top of the ratings sheet. In order to look at how PTE related to performance in the course, we also included overall point totals for the course and the schema representation project score for each participant.

Results

The results will be discussed by first presenting reliability analyses followed by descriptive statistics, correlational statistics and then a report on each of our primary research questions.

Reliability Analyses

Coefficient alphas were used to test the internal reliability of the PTE factor from the Teacher Efficacy Scale that was comprised of 12 items. The coefficient alphas for PTE were .63 on the first administration and .79 on the second administration.

Descriptive Statistics

Below in Table 1 you will find means and standard deviations for the instructional strategy variables rated for their impact on PTE, both assessments of PTE, the total points earned for the course and the schema representation project scores. The top four instructional strategies all emphasize student interaction, whereas the strategies with the lowest means involve more passive forms of learning. Therefore, with regard to our first research question, it appears that students perceive more active instructional strategies as more beneficial to increasing their PTE.

Table 1: Means and Standard Deviations for Major Study Variables

Correlational Statistics

In Table 2 below you will find Pearson's correlations of the two assessments of PTE, the overall point total for the class, the schema project scores and the instructional strategy ratings for PTE.

Table 2: Correlations

It is important to note a couple of the major findings from the matrix. The first is that both total class points and the schema project scores correlated significantly with PTE during the second assessment but not the first. This indicates a concurrent development of PTE and knowledge over the course of the semester. Second, it is important to point out that eight of the instructional strategies rated for increasing PTE correlated significantly with the second assessment of PTE. Moreover, six of the instructional strategies - lecture, schema project, course website, video, peer collaboration, and in-class illustration exercises - went from a nonsignificant correlation with PTE at the beginning of the semester to a significant correlation with PTE at the end of the semester. This finding provides further evidence for our first research question with regard to which strategies promote an increase in PTE. Also, this finding lends evidence to address our second research question in that students with high levels of PTE at the end of the semester tend attribute their gains more readily to a number of instructional strategies used within the course. This indicates that parallel gains are made in PTE along with an understanding of the value of certain instructional strategies over the course of the semester.

Research Questions

Our first research question asked what instructional strategies used in our educational psychology course are most beneficial to increasing PTE. To begin with we examined the scores from the first administration of PTE to the second administration to see if there was an overall gain in scores. Results of a paired samples t-test revealed that there was a significant gain as a whole by the class in PTE (t=-4.8; df=132; p<.01). We then computed a change variable of PTE scores from administration one to administration two and examined a frequency distribution of scores to find a cutoff score at the closest point to the top 20% of scores. The exact cutoff included 21.1% of the scores on PTE for a total of 27 cases. These 27 cases represented the students with the greatest gain in PTE from the first to the second administration. Independent samples t-tests were conducted between this PTE change group and the remainder of the subjects as a whole for each of the ten instructional strategies. Significant differences between groups were found on two of the instructional strategies. The PTE high change group reported higher ratings for in-class exercises t=-2.4; df=129; p<.05 and whole group class discussion t=-2.3; df=129; p<.05.

Our second research question was intended to measure whether students who were high in PTE differed with students low in PTE in terms of what instructional strategies they saw as most beneficial to them. To address this question we used both the first and second measures of PTE separately to categorize subjects. Cutoff scores were set as close to the top 20% and bottom 20% of scores as possible. The exact cutoffs included 21.6% of the low scores and 19.4% of the high scores for the first assessment of PTE. Independent sample t-tests revealed significant differences between the groups only on the focus group variable. The high PTE group had a significantly higher rating than did the low PTE group (t=-2.6; df=51; p<.05). For the second assessment of PTE the cutoffs were made at 20.3% for the low PTE scores and 22.5% for the high PTE groups scores. Independent sample t-tests resulted in the high PTE showing significantly higher scores for seven of the ten instructional variables. The high PTE group gave significantly higher ratings (p<.05) for lecture (t=2.3; df=57), focus group (t=4.4; df=57), schema project (t=2.2; df=57), whole-group discussion (t=5.1; df=57), the use of classroom video (t=2.1; df=56), peer collaboration (t=2.9; df=57), and in-class illustration exercises (t=4.9; df=57).

The third research question of interest was in the relationship between instructional strategies that impact learning and those that increase PTE. To measure this we correlated PTE Likert ratings for each of the instructional variables with Learning Likert ratings for each of the instructional variables. This resulted in high correlations between all ten of the instructional strategies that ranged from r = .78 for focus groups to r = .88 for course website. In general, it appears that students see a high degree of relationship between how instructional strategies affect both PTE and learning in tandem. This relationship held not only for instructional strategies that correlated with high gains in PTE but for all of the instructional strategy variables.

Finally, we examined how instructor differences affected student PTE. Independent samples t-tests were conducted between each of the instructors for the ten instructional strategies, both measures of PTE, overall point total for the course and schema grade (see Table 3).

Table 3: Independent Samples t-tests for Instructor Differences

This analysis revealed a number of significant differences including lecture, textbook, schema project, course website, textbook website, whole-group discussion, the use of classroom video, in-class exercises, schema project score, and overall class points. There were no significant differences though for PTE between instructors.

Discussion

This study sought to gain some insight into the specific instructional strategies that increase PTE. We primarily utilized measures of PTE, student ratings of specific instructional strategies and their relation to PTE and learning, and classroom outcomes. In this section the major findings will be discussed followed by study limitations and future directions.

One encouraging start to this discussion was the finding of a significant gain in PTE from the first assessment to the second for the sample as a whole. This indicates that the instructional strategies used in the course together with the student's other coursework and practicum experience contribute to greater PTE. This finding is consistent with findings in existing research that report increases in PTE during pre-service teacher training (Woolfolk, 2000). Students involved in this study were in their first semester of practicum experience in the schools. Students who reported the greatest gains over the course of the semester in PTE tended to rank whole-group class discussion and in-class illustration exercises as having a significantly higher effect on their PTE than the remainder of their peers. Both of these strategies reflect more active and transactional classroom processes.

Important differences were also found between students high and low in PTE with regard to the instructional strategies they perceived as being most beneficial to their PTE. Students high in PTE during the first assessment reported a greater importance for only one strategy, focus groups, than the low PTE group. After the second assessment of PTE those high in PTE viewed seven of the ten instructional strategies as being more important to the development of their PTE than the group low in PTE. These findings indicate that students who show marked gains in PTE also have a broader view for the instructional strategies that facilitated these gains. It appears that as students make gains in PTE they begin to explicitly recognize the instructional strategies that facilitated their gains. It is also possible that the students with the highest levels of PTE at the end of the course were more motivated to utilize and learn from the strategies available to them within the context of the course. Support for this comes from the correlation between classroom performance (overall points & schema project) with PTE at the end but not at the beginning of the semester.

Our findings would also indicate that students view PTE and learning outcomes as going hand in hand. This was evident by the high correlations between all ten of the instructional strategy ratings for PTE with the instructional strategy ratings for learning.

Finally, results of this study indicate that instructors play a significant role in how they shape PTE in their students. Both instructors in this study had the same course requirements for their students and covered nearly the same course content. Nevertheless, there were profound differences in the ratings for the instructional strategy variables between the instructor's classes. These differences appear to be largely an outgrowth of a differential emphasis in particular instructional strategies by each instructor. For instance, instructor one in the study placed a greater emphasis upon the use of the textbook and textbook website than instructor two. This emphasis was evident as students of instructor one reported those strategies as being significantly more important to PTE than students of instructor two. Likewise, instructor two placed a greater emphasis the course website and the use of in-class videos than instructor one and these differences were also revealed through statistically significant differences in favor of instructor two. Although differences were found on a number of the instructional strategy variables, no differences were found on PTE between the students taught by the different instructors. This is an important finding for two reasons: (a) because it provides evidence that students adapt to strategies emphasized by their instructors, which leads to a concurrent rise in their PTE and (b) that gains in PTE can be made through multiple pathways.

Taken together, three major findings are important to emphasize from this study. The first is that students perceive active rather than passive instructional strategies to be more important for increasing PTE. Students with the highest gains in PTE placed a proportionately greater emphasis on the importance of in-class illustration exercises and whole-group discussion than their peers. The instructional strategies with the top four overall means in relation to their impact on PTE included in-class illustration exercises, whole-group class discussion, peer collaboration, and focus group exercises. This finding has an important implication for shaping our foundational teacher-training courses and integrating more active learning strategies. The second major finding is that it appears that students who make gains in PTE develop an explicit awareness of the specific instructional strategies that facilitate this development. This awareness might be attributed to metacognitive strategy regulation that develops in parallel with gains in content knowledge. The third major finding is that the particular instructional strategies that instructors choose to emphasize appear to directly influence students' pathways to increased PTE.

Our findings provide preliminary evidence on the relationship between instructional strategies and student teachers' personal teaching efficacy. These results invite us to further investigate the process of developing PTE during the teacher education program, as well as during the initial years of teaching practice. One such possibility is to investigate more fully the distinction between active versus passive instructional strategies and their contribution to PTE. Through an experimental research design, in particular, one would be able to specify the impact of each individual instructional strategy on PTE. The result would have implications for improving teaching and designing more effective teacher education programs. Another possible follow-up study could involve looking at what specific aspects of active instructional strategies promote the development of PTE. One might trace the impact of conceptual knowledge about pedagogy on PTE as it is taught using various strategies such as the use of videos, varied examples, and in-class illustration exercises. Finally, a program of studies might involve isolating factors that promote and maintain pre-service teachers' PTE so that their PTE would be more resilient in the transition from changes of their teacher education program to a real-life teaching position. More specifically, this research program could look into strategies that focus on internal factors in facilitating preservice teachers' development of PTE, and interventions such as mentorship programs for novice teachers or other supporting mechanisms that stress external elements to avoid decreases in PTE so often observed during teachers' first years in the profession.

Authors

John Nietfeld is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at North Carolina State University. His research interests include metacognition, motivation, and adult reading.

Li Cao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology State University of West Georgia. His research focuses on teacher metacognition and teacher knowledge development.

Correspondence should be sent to John Nietfeld, North Carolina State University, Curriculum & Instruction, Poe Hall, Raleigh, NC 27695; Nietfeld@yahoo.com; phone (770) 830-6695

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