Teachers’ efficacy

A teacher’s efficacy belief is a conviction of his or her capabilities to reach desired outcomes of student engagement and learning (Bandura, 1977). Teachers’ sense of efficacy has been related to student outcomes, such as motivation, achievement, and students’ own efficacy beliefs, as well as to teachers actual behaviour in the classroom (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk-Hoy, 2001). For example teachers who demonstrate strong efficacy beliefs tend to invest more in teaching and have higher levels of ambition towards student learning. Although over the years various measures for teacher efficacy have been developed, appropriate levels of specificity in these measurements have been difficult to discern. Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy (2001) have proposed a measurement scale, the Teacher’s Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES), which relates to three factors of teacher efficacy, which are efficacy 1) for instructional strategies, 2) for classroom management, and 3) for student engagement. This measurement scale was validated for pre-service and in-service prospective teachers in secondary education. These three identified factors are also relevant for teachers at university level.

Approaches to teaching

In the field of higher education, many studies have been conducted and reported on the subject of approaches to teaching (cf. Stes et al., 2010). The ‘Approaches to Teaching Inventory’ (ATI; Trigwell & Prosser, 2004) is frequently used to examine teachers’ approaches in higher education, and its items are composed from the idea that teachers have both an intention and a strategy when teaching university courses. With the ATI different teaching intentions can be identified, including conceptual‐change and information‐transmission intentions. Teacher‐focused and student‐focused strategies can also be discerned. Factor analysis showed that the ATI distinguishes two main types of approaches to teaching: conceptual‐change/ student‐focused and information‐transmission/ teacher‐focused.

Teacher training in higher education

The effect of teacher training in higher education on academics’ efficacy beliefs were studied before by Postareff et al. (2007). They found that ‘short training (less then one year) seems to make teachers more uncertain about themselves as teachers’. Only after a longer time investment academics demonstrated increased teacher efficacy beliefs. The teacher efficacy beliefs were measured in this study with a general scale. Interesting question is if all factors of teachers’ efficacy belief, as were identified by Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy (2001), decrease after short teacher training modules.

Research aim

This study aims to improve our understanding of the effect of teacher training on changes in academics’ sense of teacher efficacy and their approaches to teaching.

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84, 191–215. Postareff, L., Lindblom-Ylanne, S., & Nevgi, A. (2007). The effect of pedagogical training on teaching in higher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23, 557-571. Stes, A., Min-Leliveld, M., Gijbels, D., & Van Petegem, P. (2010). The impact of instructional development in higher education: the state-of-the-art of the research. Educational Research Review, 5, 25-49. Trigwell, K., & Prosser, M. (2004). Development and use of the approaches to teaching inventory. Educational Psychology Review, 16, 409-424. Tschannen-Moran, M., & Woolfolk Hoy, A. (2001). Teacher efficacy: Capturing and elusive construct. Teaching and Teacher Education, 17, 783-805.