Award Date

5-1-2022

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Educational Psychology, Leadership, and Higher Education

First Committee Member

Harsha Perera

Second Committee Member

Lisa Bendixen

Third Committee Member

Vanessa Vongkulluksn

Fourth Committee Member

Peter Wiens

Number of Pages

112

Abstract

There has been substantial scholarly attention given to teachers’ functioning over the past two decades. Much of this attention has been precipitated by accounts of increasing teacher burnout and attrition from the profession. Central to this scholarly focus has been the construct of teacher self-efficacy, which has been shown to be a predictor of important teacher outcomes. However, there remain several unresolved issues in the teacher self-efficacy literature that limit the utility of the construct for understanding teachers’ effective functioning. First, there is little clarity about the dimensional structure of teachers’ self-efficacy data. Second, little empirical work has been conducted to investigate the important tenet that teachers may be differentially efficacious across distinct domains manifested as distinct profiles of teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Furthermore, it is unclear whether such profile configurations generalize across countries with distinct cultural norms and educational systems. Adopting a integrative variable and person-centered, multidimensional perspective on teachers’ self-efficacy, the current study aimed to (a) examine a bifactorial representation of teachers’ self-efficacy data as a way to reconcile conflicting psychometric representation of the construct and (b), based on the bifactorial structure, identify different profiles of teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs in the U.S. and Brazil and examine the generalizability of the profiles across these groups. In addition, the study drew on social cognitive perspectives to posit gender and years of experience as predictors of teachers’ self-efficacy profile membership, and job satisfaction, teacher collaboration, and classroom disciplinary climate as distal outcomes of profile membership. Results revealed five teachers’ self-efficacy profiles in the US and Brazilian sample, which were not found to generalize. Profile membership was shown to be predicted in the U.S. and the Brazilian samples by teacher gender and years of experience, and job satisfaction, classroom disciplinary climate, and teacher collaboration were found to differ as a function of profile membership. Implications of the results for teachers’ self-efficacy theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords

Classroom disciplinary climate; Gender; Job satisfaction; Social cognitive theory; Teacher collaboration; Teachers’ self-efficacy profiles

Disciplines

Education | Educational Psychology | Teacher Education and Professional Development

File Format

pdf

File Size

2400 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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