Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Session 26.65: Knowledge of self in the development of teacher expertise. April 3, 2002. New Orleans, LA.

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Anita Woolfolk Hoy,   The Ohio State University

The purpose of this qualitative investigation was to understand the sources of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) for an African American teacher in a suburban high school in the United States. As one of only three African American teachers in the school, she encountered many challenges that could have threatened her sense of efficacy and thus caused her to leave the school, yet she persevered.  We attempted to identify and interpret the sources of efficacy that encouraged the teacher’s persistence in an unsupportive environment. In addition, we considered how the concept of stereotype threat might help us better understand the teacher’s situation. Findings of the case study have implications for teacher self-efficacy theory and research, as well as teacher persistence.

The past two decades have witnessed a variety of attempts of measure teacher efficacy (Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy & Hoy, 1998). Many of these measures have lacked a clear conceptual base. As the concept of teacher efficacy has been refined, dissatisfaction with existing measures has increased. This paper reports the development and testing of a new measure of teacher efficacy based on the conceptual model presented by Tschannen-Moran et. al. An initial 52-item measure was pilot tested with a sample of both preservice and inservice teachers and refined using factor analysis. Validity and reliability tests demonstrated the usefulness of this new instrument. Future research of teacher efficacy will be facilitated by a measure that reflects current understandings of the construct.

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Changes in Teacher Efficacy During the Early Years of Teaching

Some of the most powerful influences on the development of teacher efficacy are mastery experiences during student teaching and the induction year. Previous research has found that some aspects of efficacy increase during student teaching while other dimensions may decline (Hoy & Woolfolk, 1990). Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy suggests that efficacy may be most malleable early in learning, thus the first years of teaching could be critical to the long-term development of teacher efficacy. Yet few longitudinal studies exist that track efficacy across these early years. This presentation will report the results of an ongoing study of changes in teacher efficacy from entry into a preparation program through the first year of actual teaching. Multiple quantitative assessments of efficacy were used including items developed for the RAND studies, Gibson and Dembo’s Teacher Efficacy Scale, Bandura’s assessment of Instructional Efficacy, and an instrument designed to reflect the specific context and goals of the preparation program studied. Preliminary results indicate increases in efficacy during student teaching. Data also have been gathered after the first year and are being analyzed. One finding is that the factor structure of some of the instruments is not stable across time. We will examine measurement issues and also explore contextual factors that appear to be associated with changes in efficacy during the first year of teaching.

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Anita Woolfolk Hoy

P. Karen Murphy

Pamela. J. Gaskill

The Ohio State University

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle, WA, April, 2001.

With the dominance of cognitive perspectives in education and psychology has come an interest in the thinking of teachers. Since the 1980s, research has burgeoned on teachers’ knowledge and beliefs; reviews are plentiful (e.g., Borko & Putnam, 1996; Calderhead, 1996; Clark & Peterson, 1986; Fenstermacher, 1994; Kagan, 1990, 1992; Nespor, 1987; Pajares, 1992; Rentel, 1994; Richardson, 1994, 1996). Researchers have investigated both explicit and implicit beliefs of preservice, novice, and experienced teachers. Although some investigators have sought to identify beliefs (cf., Weinstein, 1988, 1989), others have examined how knowledge and beliefs affect learning to teach (cf., Hollingworth, 1989) or instruction in particular subjects (Richardson, 1994).

This interest in the knowledge and beliefs of teachers is fueled by several sources. In research on effective teaching, dissatisfaction with findings about teacher behaviors led to a concern with teachers’ thinking, planning, and intentions (Clark & Peterson, 1986; Fenstermacher, 1979). Several current perspectives on learning--from information processing to constructivist views--highlight the influence of knowledge on attention, understanding, and memory. What we already know, our knowledge base, "is a scaffold that supports the construction of all future learning" (Alexander, 1996, p. 31). Thus, researchers focused on the knowledge, implicit and explicit, that scaffolds learning to teach. Finally, teacher educators recognized the power of prospective teachers’ entering beliefs in shaping their responses to preparation programs (Pajares, 1992, Richardson, 1996). As noted by Borko and Putnam (1996), "...the knowledge and beliefs that prospective and experienced teachers hold serve as filters through which their learning takes place. It is through these existing conceptions that teachers come to understand recommended new practices" (p. 675).

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the implications for educational psychologists and teacher educators of prospective teachers’ implicit knowledge and beliefs about students, teaching, learning, and learning to teach. We begin by exploring the nature and origin of teachers' knowledge and beliefs, then consider how prospective teachers’ conceptions affect their own learning in a teacher preparation program and what might be done to enhance learning in light of these influences. Finally, we examine the implications of prospective teachers’ knowledge and beliefs for teaching educational psychology.

An expanded version of this paper appears  in B. Torff & R. Sternberg (Eds.). Understanding and teaching the intuitive mind. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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