Teacher Efficacy within Social Cognitive Theory
The construct of self-efficacy is central to Bandura’s (1986) SCT, which views individuals as active agents whose interpretations of the results of their performances inform and alter ‘their environments, and self-beliefs, which in turn inform, and alter their subsequent performances’ (Pajares, 1996: 542). SCT is based on a reciprocal relationship between behaviour, environment and personal factors (e.g. cognitive, biological), with each dynamically and bi-directionally interacting and influencing the others – what is known as ‘triadic reciprocal causation’ (Bandura, 1986).
Humans are capable of self-referent thought, with the capacity to regulate their effort and reflect on their activities. Thus, SCT rejects a behaviouralist view of the world, in which individuals primarily respond to their environments; it recognises that individuals can plan and have the capacity for self-influence. As Bandura (1997: 3) has stated, individuals’ behaviour (e.g. teaching practice) is dynamically influenced by personal factors (e.g. available pedagogic skills) and the environment they are in (e.g. the school context), where ‘people are contributors to, rather than the sole determiners of, what happens to them’. Simply put, individuals can shape and change their environments by using the skills they perceive to be available to them and choosing different courses of action. Thus, teachers can influence, but not determine, the learning that occurs within, and beyond, their classrooms.
An SCT perspective indicates that teacher beliefs (and other personal factors), behaviour and context reciprocally influence each other. In fact, such a view aligns with conceptual frameworks of language teacher beliefs, such as Borg’s original (2003) and revised (Borg, 2006) models, which focus on the dynamic relationship between beliefs and contextualised behaviour. Thus, for language teachers, self-beliefs and perceptions of individual ability (e.g. of second language [L2] ability) may influence efficacy beliefs towards (or against) teaching tasks that require the teacher to act as a language model. The teacher’s interpretation of the results of the behaviour (i.e. whether they are perceived to be successful or unsuccessful) may then influence beliefs and other individual factors (e.g. stronger perceived capability to achieve the task in the future). Furthermore, both may also be influenced by context (e.g. working at a school with motivated students versus with students who have no desire or need to speak English). Thus, in the assessment of their efficacy beliefs, individuals are likely to weigh up the difficulty of carrying out the task (e.g. is it possible or valued?) and the expected outcome (i.e. will it be perceived to influence student learning and development?), alongside the skills they perceive available to use in achieving the task (see Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1 Conceptual framework of self-efficacy assessment
Accordingly, self-efficacy beliefs are argued to influence agency, motivation and self-regulation, and to mediate states of anxiety. Agency is concerned with individuals’ capacity to control and coordinate their actions, beliefs and emotions to reach goals. Therefore, agency is the driver of intentional acts (as opposed to outcomes, which may be unintended). Bandura (2001: 10) claimed that ‘efficacy beliefs are the foundation of human agency’ and summarised their importance, stating ‘whatever other factors may operate as guides and motivators, they are rooted in the core belief that one has the power to produce effects by one’s actions’. As self-efficacy beliefs are perceptions of capability, these beliefs influence choice and effort towards goals, that is, individuals ‘regulate their level and distribution of effort in accordance with the effects they expect their actions to have’ (Bandura, 1986: 129).
Efficacy beliefs have also been consistently shown to have a negative relationship with anxiety (Mills et al., 2006; Pajares & Kranzler, 1995; Swars et al., 2006). Such a relationship is not surprising, as people who perceive a negative emotional and threatening response towards a task (e.g. anxiety towards teaching via English) may also believe themselves less capable of bringing about actions to complete it. Thus, anxiety and other affective responses are likely to be influences on the development of efficacy beliefs. However, research has also indicated that efficacy beliefs mediate the impact of anxiety on performance (Pajares & Kranzler, 1995; Siegel et al., 1985), as individuals with stronger capability to cope with task demands are also more likely to manage the negative influence of anxiety. This may be due to individuals responding to their self-doubts by ‘acquiring knowledge and skills’, which provide them with stronger perceived capability to manage the threatening situation (Bandura, 1997: 76).
Accordingly, self-efficacy beliefs are hypothesised to be key to motivation (Zimmerman, 2000), and their causal influence has been demonstrated in the wider psychological research literature (Pintrich & Schunk, 1996; Schunk, 1995) for language learning (Kormos et al., 2011; Oxford & Shearin, 1994; Tremblay & Gardner, 1995) and for teaching (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2014). In summary, individuals with stronger perceived capability for specific tasks are more likely to choose and expend effort on such activities.
Research within the field of teacher efficacy has supported these ideas, as teachers with stronger efficacy beliefs towards a subject (or subject area) are more likely to be more persistent and spend greater time teaching it (Enochs et al., 1995; Mulholland & Wallace, 2001; Woolfolk Hoy & Davis, 2006), and are likely to have stronger commitment to teaching (Chan et al., 2008; Chesnut & Burley, 2015; Ware & Kitsantas, 2007). On the other hand, low teacher efficacy towards a subject is associated with spending less time teaching that subject area (Enochs & Riggs, 1990). Furthermore, findings have also supported a link between teacher and student efficacy and student achievement (Bolshakova et al., 2011; Chang, 2015), indicating that teacher efficacy beliefs may influence not only teacher motivation and effort, but also student motivation.
2.3 How Efficacy Beliefs Differ from Other Self-Constructs
Although they are intertwined, self-constructs are generally divided by those that are primarily cognitive (i.e. centred on the knowledge and beliefs that individuals have about themselves and their abilities) versus those that are affective (i.e. primarily emotional and based on the feelings that people have about themselves, see Williams et al., 2015). This section briefly discusses how self-efficacy can be differentiated from other self-constructs by orientation, domain and character of evaluation.
As a form of expectancy belief, efficacy expectations represent perceptions of capability to carry out actions in the pursuit of outcomes. Firstly, efficacy beliefs have a future orientation (Zimmerman, 2000); they involve individuals carrying out an evaluation of their personal skills towards (potential) future behaviours. Second, efficacy beliefs are context and task dependent; the strength of these beliefs varies by the teaching task and the situation within which it is carried out (see Wyatt, 2018a). Finally, as explained in Section 2.6 (also see Figure 2.1), they involve individuals carrying out internal cognitive appraisals of the task conditions and the skills that are required for successful completion.
This contrasts efficacy beliefs with other self-constructs, such as self-concept and self-esteem, which do not have a future orientation, but rather a descriptive function concerned with evaluations of one’s competence (self-concept) and emotional self-worth (self-esteem). For example, Mercer (2008) explained that self-esteem has the strongest evaluative component, and is primarily affective, as it brings together the positive and negative feelings that people hold of themselves. Although self-esteem is also influenced by self-beliefs, these are primarily attitudinal (Rosenberg, 1965), in that self-esteem integrates a person’s self-beliefs of their value or worth. For example, global self-esteem evaluations can be shown by statements such as ‘I am a good person’ (Leary & Downs, 1995: 124).
Self-concept refers to a ‘general self-descriptive construct’ that integrates both ‘self-knowledge and self-evaluations’ (Zimmerman, 2000: 84). Generally, self-concept is viewed as a hierarchy (Marsh & Shavelson, 1985) with ‘global’ self-concept at the top, which brings together the self-beliefs people have towards their competency in different domains.