Increasing the Self-Efficacy of Inservice Teachers through Content Knowledge

A teacher's sense of self-efficacy has been consistently recognized as an important attribute of effective teaching and has been positively correlated to teacher and student outcomes (Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy, & Hoy, 1998). A number of studies show the impact of teachers with high levels of efficacy. Students of these teachers have outperformed students who had teachers with lower levels of efficacy on the mathematics section of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (Moore & Esselman, 1992). Greater achievement was also found in rural, urban, majority Black, and majority White schools for students who had teachers with high levels of self-efficacy (Watson, 1991). In addition, studies have shown that teachers with high levels of efficacy have demonstrated different characteristics related to work ethic and pedagogical practice than teachers with low levels of self-efficacy. For example, studies have shown that teachers with high levels of self-efficacy work longer with students that struggle, recognize student errors, and attempt new teaching methods that support students (Gibson & Dembo, 1984; Ashton & Webb, 1986; Guskey, 1988). Czernaik (1990) found that highly efficacious teachers were more likely to use "reform-based" teaching methods, such as inquiry-based and student-centered approaches, while teachers with low levels of self-efficacy used more teacher-directed methods, such as lecturing and textbook reading. The benefits of having high levels of efficacy have been firmly established; therefore, many researchers have explored methods of increasing levels of efficacy in preservice teachers (see Swars, 2005; Palmer, 2006; Utley, Bryant, & Moseley, 2005); but few studies have explored the concept of raising inservice teachers' efficacy levels. This is partly due to the fact that the concept of self-efficacy, as developed by Bandura (1993), has been thought to impact novice individuals early in the context of new learning, thus limiting the studies of practicing or in-service teachers. In this article, we examine teachers' self-efficacy and change over time. In the following section we detail self-efficacy and the ways that self-efficacy can impact teaching. Self-efficacy has been defined by Bandura (1997) as "beliefs in one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments" (p. 3). Self-efficacy is context specific, meaning the level of perceived ability changes for each person depending upon the situation or task (Tschannen-Moran, et. al., 1998). Thus professional development or further education that impacts a teacher's understanding of their craft can affect the teacher's perceived ability level and therefore self-efficacy. Bandura's theory of self-efficacy contains two expectancies, self-efficacy and outcome efficacy. Self-efficacy expectation provides individuals a way to decide whether they have the ability to perform the required task at the desired level of competency, while outcome expectancy provides individuals a way to decide if they have accomplished a task at a desired level (Tschannen-Moran, et. al.). Researchers have used Bandura's theory in the field of education in order to study teacher self-efficacy; and two dimensions of teacher efficacy consistently have been found to be independent measures: personal teaching efficacy and general teaching efficacy, sometimes referred to as outcome efficacy (Woolfolk-Hoy & Burke-Spero, 2005). Personal teacher efficacy is generally defined as a teacher's belief in his or her skills and abilities to positively impact student achievement, while general (outcome) teaching efficacy has been defined as a teacher's belief that the educational system can work for all students, regardless of outside influences such as socio-economic status and parental influence. In considering the context of an inservice teacher with lower levels of specific content knowledge, we posit that content courses which are designed to support a teacher's development of content knowledge and pedagogy can be a valuable way to increase levels of self-efficacy. …