Teacher Efficacy: Characteristics, Student Achievement, and Instruction

Description and Characteristics of Teacher Efficacy

Discourses about education abound and involve various examinations of different aspects of educational practice. Among these discourses is the concept of teacher efficacy and the manner in which it impacts students and learning environments. The following literature review provides information about teacher efficacy, focusing on three primary aspects: the characteristics of the concept, the impact of teacher efficacy on student achievement, and teacher efficacy in relation to variety of instruction.

According to Tschannen-Moran et al. (1998), teacher efficacy is "the extent to which the teacher believes he or she has the capacity to affect student performance," or "teachers' belief or conviction that they can influence how well students learn, even those who may be difficult or unmotivated" (Guskey & Passaro, 1994, p. 4; Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998). In other words, teacher efficacy involves an educator's belief about the effectiveness of their own abilities as an instructor.

Tschannen-Moran et al. (1998) also explain that the theory of teacher efficacy was originally developed by RAND researchers, who examined the degree to which educators were convinced they had command over the reinforcement of their performance — that is, whether that command resided in the environment or within the teachers themselves. The results demonstrated that both student performance and student motivation reinforced the teaching actions of instructors. Accordingly, educators who possessed higher levels of efficacy believed they had a great deal of control over motivating students and influencing student achievement.

Other theories of teacher efficacy also developed as a result of subsequent research. One important strand was developed by Bandura (1977), who found that teacher efficacy was perceived as a type of self-efficacy — a construct in which individuals form opinions about their ability to perform at a specific level. These opinions are evident in the amount of effort people make, their persistence when facing adversity, the stress they feel when working through difficult circumstances, and the manner in which they deal with failure. Tschannen-Moran et al. (1998) explain that these two different but linked conceptual theories are responsible for the lack of clarity concerning the nature of teacher efficacy.

Although the nature of teacher efficacy can be difficult to define precisely, there is no doubt that the concept exists and that it can have a significant effect on the educational environment. According to Hoy and Woolfolk (1993), teacher efficacy has an impact on the health of the entire educational institution.

School Health and Organizational Context

Hoy and Woolfolk (1993) note that the concept of school climate has been expressed in many different ways. In some instances, researchers have used a personality metaphor to describe the interpersonal relationships that characterize the school environment. Hoy and Woolfolk (1993) choose instead to explain these relationships in terms of health, arguing that it more accurately describes the school environment.

The concept of school health was developed to capture the nature of student-teacher, teacher-teacher, and teacher-administrator interactions. The idea of health within an organization is not new; it calls attention to factors that both facilitate and impede the development of positive interpersonal relationships within the organization (Hoy & Forsyth, 1986; Miles, 1969). A healthy school is one in which harmony pervades relationships among students, teachers, and administrators as the organization directs its energies toward its mission. Healthy schools appear to be high-achieving schools (Hoy et al., 1990; Hoy, Tarter, et al., 1991; Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993).

In attempting to explain the differences between effective and ineffective schools, researchers have identified organizational features that correlate with student achievement. These features include good relationships among co-workers and high expectations for students, both of which can determine the overall health of a school (Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993).

All social systems, including schools, must resolve four basic issues if they are to last, prosper, and improve. For schools, these four issues involve both instrumental needs and expressive needs. The instrumental needs are adaptation and goal achievement; the expressive needs include social and normative integration. According to Hoy and Woolfolk (1993), students must have the ability to handle their environments while attempting to achieve goals — meeting instrumental needs. In addition, schools must be well organized while also creating their own values and cultures — meeting expressive needs.

There are three levels of control through which instrumental and expressive needs are met: technical, managerial, and institutional (Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993). The technical level involves the teaching-learning activity itself. The primary goal of a school is to ensure that students are learning, and resolving the issues correlated with effective teaching and learning is the shared responsibility of administrators and teachers. The managerial level is controlled by the administrative operations internal to the organization. Principals serve as the main administrators in a school setting and are responsible for distributing resources, ensuring that teachers carry out designated tasks, and controlling the climate of the school as it pertains to trust, enthusiasm, and allegiance. Principals must also have the capacity to influence higher-level leaders who control the distribution of resources. The institutional level involves the relationship between the school and its surrounding environment. Schools must have community support in order to operate effectively, and the manner in which a school interacts with its community should be cooperative rather than fraught with unreasonable pressure (Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993).

The authors summarize: "A healthy school is one in which the technical, managerial, and institutional levels are in harmony and the school is meeting both its instrumental and expressive needs as it successfully copes with disruptive external forces and directs its energies toward its mission. Six dimensions of organizational health — institutional integrity, principal influence, consideration, resource support, morale, and academic emphasis — have been identified to describe the health of a school. These critical aspects of organizational life meet the instrumental and expressive needs of the school social system and fall into Parsons's three levels of responsibility and control within the school" (Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993).

Understanding these levels is essential to understanding how school health influences teacher efficacy and vice versa; the health of schools and teacher efficacy are mutually dependent.

In their study, Hoy and Woolfolk (1993) randomly selected 179 elementary school teachers from a total of 37 elementary schools. The sample was heterogeneous, drawn from schools in different geographic areas and socioeconomic levels. However, more than half of the 37 participating schools (27) were from districts with above-average wealth, meaning the sample is skewed toward more advantaged schools — a limitation that should be considered when interpreting the results. Five teachers participated from each school, and 97% completed usable questionnaires. The average years of experience was 14.43, the mean age was 42, 83% of participants were women, 80% had tenure, and the average class size was 21 (Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993).

The findings demonstrate that the personal characteristics of teachers and their perceptions of their school are paramount in forming teacher efficacy. The study found that the teacher's surroundings affected their sense of efficacy as it pertained to motivating students, and a reciprocal relationship emerged: teacher efficacy affects the school environment, and the school environment affects teacher efficacy. Specifically, two aspects of organizational life predicted personal teaching efficacy — principal influence and academic emphasis. Both variables were significantly related to a sense of personal teaching efficacy after controlling for all other personal and organizational characteristics in the study (Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993).

The study also found that the promotion of personal teaching efficacy was most evident in schools where teachers and administrators set goals that were high but achievable, the school climate was organized and serious, and academic excellence was highly valued. Moreover, teachers' perceptions that their principals could influence superiors contributed to greater teacher efficacy — findings consistent with previous research (Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993).

How Teacher Efficacy Impacts Student Achievement

The authors also point out that collective efficacy is not limited to education as a driver of positive outcomes. Collective efficacy is important in other organizations, including businesses, and positive outcomes realized from collective efficacy in other domains only reinforce the need for collective efficacy in the realm of education (Goddard et al., 2004).

From an educational standpoint, the authors assert that collective efficacy encompasses not only self-efficacy but also teachers' opinions about the capacity of the school as a whole to meet students' needs. This group-level belief within organizations is described as perceived collective efficacy — the opinions of organizational members concerning the performance abilities of the entire unit. In the school context, collective efficacy is defined as "the judgment of teachers in a school that the faculty as a whole can organize and execute the courses of action required to have a positive effect on students" (Goddard et al., 2004).

Research has found a substantive correlation between perceived collective efficacy and differences in student achievement among various schools (Bandura, 1993; Goddard, 2001; Goddard et al., 2000; Goddard et al., 2004). Bandura found that the effect of perceived collective efficacy on student achievement was greater than the correlation between socioeconomic status (SES) and student achievement. Goddard also discovered that, even after controlling for race/ethnicity, gender, prior achievement, and SES, perceived collective efficacy had a more substantial impact on student achievement than did race or SES (Goddard et al., 2004). Furthermore, teachers held varying beliefs concerning the collective ability of schools, and these perceptions had a definite impact on student achievement.

Beyond student achievement, perceived collective efficacy also assists in any type of goal attainment. Research has found that a greater sense of collective efficacy in urban neighborhoods results in lower levels of violence, and that neighborhoods with strong collective efficacy are ones in which citizens feel an expectation for action that predisposes them to intervene to decrease violent activity. Little and Madigan (1997) have also shown that perceived collective efficacy is a strong positive predictor of work group effectiveness, describing a group's sense of collective efficacy as having "a mediating, or facilitating effect on team performance" (as cited in Goddard et al., 2004).

Perceived collective efficacy is so influential because it represents expectations for action that are diffused via collective efficacy perceptions (Sampson, Morenoff, & Earls, 2000; Goddard et al., 2004). Collective efficacy perceptions illuminate the manner in which an organization's abilities are put to use to reach a stated goal, and in some cases affect the persistence associated with pursuing those goals. Collective efficacy can thus be viewed as a powerful descriptor of the standards and behavioral norms associated with organizational culture — an understanding essential to comprehending how school culture shapes both teacher performance and student achievement (Goddard et al., 2004).

As teachers and administrators work to improve academic achievement, schools must investigate the power they have to develop an environment conducive to learning. Like personal self-efficacy, collective efficacy is correlated with task commitment, degree of effort, persistence, shared thinking, stress levels, and achievement among group members. From an organizational standpoint, a faculty's sense of collective efficacy provides insight into the varying effects that school culture has on both teachers and students (Goddard et al., 2004). Some school environments positively influence teachers while others have a negative impact. Teachers in schools with low academic standards tend to have poor perceptions of collective efficacy; those in schools with high standards and confidence in their faculty's collective abilities tend to perform better (Goddard et al., 2004).

In sum, teacher efficacy is fundamentally a theory about teachers' beliefs concerning their own competence. How teachers feel about their performance is important and can serve as a predictor of the overall health of an organization. The greater the teacher efficacy in a school environment, the more likely that school is to function as a healthy organization. Research also suggests that collective efficacy is an emerging area of interest that illuminates the impact of the school environment on motivating both teachers and students.

Teacher efficacy can have a profound impact on student achievement. When teachers do not feel adequate as instructors, students are less likely to excel. Conversely, when teachers feel confident in their abilities, that confidence carries over into their classrooms, and higher student achievement is the result. Several studies have examined this relationship in depth.

According to Ross (1992), prior research indicates that teacher efficacy can influence both the development of innovative programs and student achievement. McLaughlin and Marsh (1978) used a questionnaire to assess two dimensions of teacher efficacy — Rand 1 (general teaching efficacy) and Rand 2 (personal teaching efficacy) — and found "an extended causal chain from teacher efficacy to teacher behavior to student efficacy to student behavior to student achievement." Additionally, Ashton and Webb (1986) discovered that Rand 1 was associated with student math scores and Rand 2 with language performance. In both instances, the measures were linked to teachers' instructional tendencies, including the creation of a positive emotional climate in the classroom (Ross, 1992).

Smylie (1988) identified three measurement tools for personal teacher efficacy that show a positive correlation to the implementation of interactive teaching programs. Stein and Wang (1988) had teachers appraise how well they could implement each of 22 elements in a mainstreaming program, and scores were positively correlated with actual implementation. Anderson, Greene, and Loewen (1988) used the Gibson and Dembo instruments and found that personal teaching efficacy predicted student achievement in reading, language, and math among third-grade students (Ross, 1992).

Past research has also found that teacher efficacy mediates the relationship between teacher practice and teacher collaboration. Poole and Okeafor (1989) discovered that teachers with higher levels of general teaching efficacy were more likely to implement new programs when they collaborated more with colleagues, while teachers with higher personal teaching efficacy were more likely to follow district curriculum guides when they worked more independently (Ross, 1992).

The study conducted by Ross (1992) examined teacher efficacy and the effects of coaching on student achievement. The sample consisted of 18 history teachers from rural Ontario, with a heterogeneous range of experience, educational qualifications, types of assignments, age, and sex. Cumulatively, the participating teachers had 36 classes and were supported by six coaches chosen for their confidence and motivation in history instruction. Coaches were paired with teachers based on geography. Teachers were tasked with implementing a new history curriculum guideline and were provided with three types of resources: curriculum materials (including the guideline itself, instructional materials, and print and non-print resources), workshops held over three days throughout the school year, and collaboration with coaches.

The workshops emphasized specific strategies for meeting the cognitive skill expectations of the history program. They followed a demonstration-practice-feedback format in which teaching strategies were demonstrated in a large group setting, practice activities were completed in small groups led by coaches, and implementation schedules were developed following feedback (Ross, 1992). The coaching component was derived from the In-School Resource Coaching Model (1987), modified so that the relationship was less reciprocal — coaches were relative experts in the history program, and there was virtually no classroom observation component.

Two hypotheses guided the study. The first — that classrooms in which teachers interacted more with coaches would show higher student achievement — was supported. However, the author notes that while coaching practices likely contributed to higher achievement, it is also possible that teachers already enjoying greater success sought out their coaches more often, or that coaches responded more enthusiastically to success. The second hypothesis — that student achievement would be positively affected by teachers with higher levels of teacher efficacy — was also supported. Specifically, personal teaching efficacy (rather than general teaching efficacy) was the significant predictor of student achievement (Ross, 1992).

Ross (1992) further notes that teacher efficacy was measured only once in this study, consistent with standard practice, though some researchers argue that treating teacher efficacy as a variable state rather than a fixed trait may yield more accurate results. Studies of preservice teachers have shown changes in efficacy over time: Stein and Wang (1988) found that teacher confidence often increases as teachers apply innovations in their classrooms, and Hoy and Woolfolk (1990) found that general teaching efficacy tended to decrease while personal teaching efficacy increased once preservice teachers gained practical experience. Housego (1990) similarly observed that practice teaching significantly increased preservice teachers' confidence and sense of preparedness to teach.

Overall, the research indicates that teachers with greater efficacy have more confidence, which enables them to attempt innovative teaching methods that can lead to higher levels of academic achievement. High academic standards, administrative support, and mentoring through coaching all contribute to both teacher efficacy and student achievement.

Teacher efficacy plays a particularly important role across a variety of instructional contexts, including subjects that can significantly impact students' future academic endeavors. The implementation of varied instruction is therefore encouraged. One such context is literacy instruction.

According to Cantrell and Callaway (2008), national assessments in recent years have shown that many students are not prepared for postsecondary education, and that reading abilities among students have declined. As a result, adolescent literacy has become a topic of debate among educators, with the federal government offering funding for programs targeting adolescent literacy. Past research has established the need to integrate literacy instruction into both high school and middle school curricula, though previous attempts at such integration have not always been successful. In many cases, teachers are not adequately prepared to implement content literacy approaches, and the practices associated with content literacy instruction are often inconsistent with the conventional cultures and traditions of middle and high schools (Cantrell & Callaway, 2008).

Teacher efficacy is therefore of critical importance to literacy instruction because it is context specific. As Cantrell and Callaway (2008) note: "Given the fact that middle and secondary content teachers value literacy teaching, but tend not to feel efficacious with literacy instructional practices, studies examining the relationships between literacy teaching and teacher efficacy are needed" (Hall, 2005). Because most teacher efficacy research has involved correlational studies that do not examine facets of teacher efficacy in depth or provide context-specific information, some researchers have called for process-oriented and interpretive research on teacher efficacy (LaBone, 2004; Wheatley, 2005; Cantrell & Callaway, 2008).

Conclusion

Ross, J. A. (1992). Teacher efficacy and the effects of coaching on student achievement. Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation, 17(1), 51–65.

Tschannen-Moran, M., Hoy, A. W., & Hoy, W. K. (1998). Teacher efficacy: Its meaning and measure. Review of Educational Research, 68(2), 202–248.

Wheatley, K. F. (2005). The case for reconceptualizing teacher efficacy research. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21(7), 747–766.