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Teacher Comparison: Final Part

© Valerie Ringrose

Similarly, it is not unreasonable to surmise that as people accrue more experience performing a task, they become more confident about preforming that task. Teaching experience creates a situation where developing and maintaining expertise in certain teaching strategies strengthens the teacher's confidence in performing these teaching activities. The more success experiences a teacher has with a selected activity, the more that teacher is likely to believe that such an activity will be successful.

Experience and factors related to experience seem to contribute to the development of teacher efficacy. Based on the results of this study, experienced teachers, older teachers, and teachers with graduate work in Education or related experiences have more teacher efficacy than pre-service teachers. This general finding is equally true for Scottish teachers and American teachers.

Conclusion

Apparently, teaching experience and factors related to experience contribute to the development of teacher efficacy in much the same way in both Scotland and America. The teacher education programs of both countries seem quite similar in the contributions they make in the development of teacher efficacy in pre-service of teachers and in-service teachers.

The research agenda of teacher education professionals not only in Scotland and America, but in all countries might well include such questions as:

* Do all types of post-baccalaureate educational experiences contribute equally to the development of teacher efficacy? What types of professional development are best for the purpose of developing teacher efficacy?

* Does teacher efficacy simply develop over time or does it develop over time when accompanied by full-time teaching experience?

* Are there activities or experiences that could be included in pre-service teacher education programs which would accelerate the development of teacher efficacy? The importance of this question is magnified by the results of a study by Housego (1992). Among Housego' s findings when looking at a cohort group of elementary education students at a Canadian University was the fact that, "Total group teaching efficacy, measured over all four terms, declined significantly through the program" (p. 269).

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Towards a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84, 191-215.

Dembo, M.H. & Gibson, S. (1985). Teachers' sense of efficacy: An important factor in school improvement. Elementary School Journal, 86 (2), 173- 184.

Gibson, S. & Dembo, M.H. (1984). Teacher efficacy: A construct validation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76 (4), 569-582.

Gorrell, J. & Capron, E.W. (1990). Cognitive modeling and self-efficacy: Effects on pre-service teachers' learning of teaching strategies. Journal of Teacher Education, 41 (50), 15-22.

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