Exploring the interaction between Science teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and pedagogical discontentment: An attempt to understand why science education reform fails

Scientific literacy is currently one of the main purposes of science education. Science education reform efforts provide rich, comprehensive and explicit messages, ideas suggestions with teachers to promote scientific literacy through student-centered and inquiry-based instructional implementations. However, systemic change that reform aims to achieve yet to come through as most of the science teachers are still using teacher-centered lecture style science teaching rather than implementing reform initiatives. The purpose of this paper is an attempt to shed light on the existing literature to understand why science teachers would not employ reform initiatives in their classrooms. Teacher self-efficacy and pedagogical discontentment are selected to be the target constructs that the interactions between them hold promises to explore teacher averseness to reform. 130 science teachers working in public middle schools located in northern Turkey were participated in this study. The findings derived from this research provided several key interactions between self-efficacy beliefs and pedagogical discontentment in terms of the participating teachers’ openness toward science education reform in Turkey. Methodological implications were also embraced.