A test of the factorial validity of the teacher efficacy scale

Research in Education, May 2003 by Brouwers, Andre, Tomic, Welko

The factorial validity of the Teacher Efficacy Scale was tested using confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of 540 practising teachers. Four factorial models were formulated on the basis of theoretical analysis as well as the results of several validity studies on the Teacher Efficacy Scale. In accordance with Bandura's (1997) self-efficacy theory, the results revealed that the fit of the four-factor oblique model was significantly better than that of the other factorial models. However, the fit of the four-factor model did not reach the recommended criterion of adequately fitting models. After eliminating three poorly loaded items, the model's fit improved significantly but insufficiently to reach the fit criterion. It was concluded that the Teacher Efficacy Scale in its current state is not suitable to obtain precise and valid information about teacher efficacy beliefs. Recommendations to improve the factorial validity of the Teacher Efficacy Scale are made.

Key words Teacher efficacy, Factorial validity.

The psychological and educational literature devotes much attention to the concept of teacher efficacy, which is usually described as 'the extent to which the teacher believes he or she has the capacity to affect student performance' (Bergman et al., 1977, p. 137). In a review of virtually all sources dated between 1974 and 1997 that used the term 'teacher efficacy' Tschannen-Moran et al. (1998) identified over 100 articles, conference papers and books that refer somehow or other to teacher efficacy. Down through the years the concept of teacher efficacy has been connected with many important educational variables such as student achievement, student attitudes to school, student attitudes to the subject matter being taught, student attitudes to the teacher, teachers' classroom behaviours, teachers' attitudes to teaching, teacher stress and burn-out, and teachers' willingness to implement innovation (Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998).

Many measurement instruments have been developed to assess teacher efficacy, based on two areas of research (Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998). The first one is grounded in Rotter's social learning theory of internal versus external control (1966). According to this theory, teachers who believe that they are competent to teach difficult or unmotivated students are considered to have internal control, whereas teachers who believe that the environment has more influence on student learning than their own teaching ability are considered to have external control. The Rand organisation, the first to conduct research on teacher efficacy, developed two items to measure a teacher's locus of control (Armor et al., 1976). The statement that indicates that environmental factors overwhelm a teacher's power to influence student learning was labelled 'general teaching efficacy'. The other, labelled 'personal teaching efficacy', indicates the importance of a teacher's ability to overcome factors that could make learning difficult for students. In the course of time several other instruments were developed to measure teacher efficacy in the Rotter tradition, including Teacher Locus of Control (Rose and Medway, 1981), Responsibility for Student Achievement (Guskey, 1981) and the Webb Efficacy Scale (Ashton et al., 1982).

The second area of research on teacher efficacy is grounded in Bandura's social cognitive theory and his construct of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977). Bandura distinguishes between two kinds of expectation, self-efficacy and outcome expectation. A self-efficacy expectation is the individual's conviction that he or she has the 'capabilities to organise and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments' (Bandura, 1997, p. 3), while an outcome expectation is the individual's estimate of the likely consequences of his or her actions. Several measures grew out of this tradition, including the Teacher Efficacy Scale (Gibson and Dembo, 1984), the Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument (Riggs and Enochs, 1990), the Ashton Vignettes (Ashton et al., 1984), and the Teacher Self-efficacy Scale (Bandura, 1990).

Undoubtedly the most frequently used instrument to assess teacher efficacy is Gibson and Dembo's (1984) Teacher Efficacy Scale (Ross, 1994, 1998). Gibson and Dembo (1984) developed this thirty-item questionnaire to measure the two dimensions of Bandura's theory, self-efficacy and outcome expectations. Principal components analysis with varimax rotation on their sample of 208 elementary school teachers yielded two factors that together accounted for 28.8 per cent of the total variance. Gibson and Dembo (1984) interpreted these factors as corresponding to Bandura's self-efficacy and outcome dimensions, and conceptualised them as Personal Teaching Efficacy and Teaching Efficacy respectively. As Gibson and Dembo (1984) yielded acceptable reliability coefficients from only sixteen of the original thirty items, most research utilising the Teacher Efficacy Scale used these sixteen items only.