Teacher beliefs as defined by Kagan (1992) are “the assumptions teachers hold about students, classrooms and the academic material to be thought” (p. 65). They essentially do not require a condition of truth but are more judgmental and evaluative, different from knowledge based on the objective facts (Nespor, 1985). Adapted from the social cognitive theory of Bandura (1986), teacher self-efficacy beliefs, on the other hand, refers to the teachers’ self-evaluation of their abilities to carry out an action to attain a particular teaching task in a specific context (Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy, & Hoy, 1998).

Pajares (1992) strongly maintained that teacher beliefs should comprise a critical area of concern for educational inquiry due to their possible effect on teachers’ planning, instructional decision making, and classroom practices. In congruence with this view, teacher self-efficacy beliefs were generally associated with positive educational outcomes in the literature. To name a few, they were introduced to be related with teachers’ allocation of more instructional time for academic learning and their improved coping ability with the students with learning difficulties (Gibson & Dembo, 1984); establishment of positive teacher-child and teacher-parent relationships (Chung, Marvin, & Churchill, 2005) , and also a lower level of burn-out among teachers in case of educational innovations (Evers, Brouwers, & Tomic, 2002).  

Given that teacher self-efficacy beliefs is the most powerful teacher characteristics in explaining the achievement of project goals, student achievement, teacher change, and maintenance of project materials and methods (Berman & McLaughlin, 1977), it is without doubt of  high value for the educational research to inspect its sources. Along with other numerous variables, teachers’ beliefs about teaching and years of experience, which are the focus of the present study, can account for the difference in the self-efficacy beliefs of teachers and so in their practices. McMullen (1999), for instance, argued that early childhood teachers with a higher sense of self-efficacy may be more innovative and risky in their teaching and so more likely to believe in developmentally appropriate practices based on the constructivist way of education. Given the influence of teachers’ years of experience on teacher self-efficacy, teachers with 10 or more years of experience may be considerably more efficacious (Fives & Buehl, 2010), consistent with the finding that there may be a significant difference between the novice and experienced teachers as regards their level of self-efficacy (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2007).

Consequently, the research on teacher beliefs can potentially offer significant implications for the improvement of educational effectiveness though they have not been investigated adequately yet. The beliefs of early childhood teachers particularly present an area of gap in the literature (McMullen, 2001; Rivilland, 2007). The current study as a contribution to filling in this gap mainly aims at probing the relation of teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs with teachers’ beliefs about teaching and years of experience. In this respect, by attempting to indicate the factors which may be related with teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs, it can shed light on several implications for the educational effectiveness.

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