Hi Christine - Thank you for visiting our video. We certainly hope this work will be useful for those working with early career teachers. It's been interesting to learn about not only teachers' overall levels of self-efficacy but also the wide range of experiences and factors that have shaped their self-efficacy.  

Hi Ann - Thanks for your thoughtful questions. We don't have a definitive explanation for the difference in positive and negative affective/physiological states, but I think it may have to do with the salience of various states and how they relate with the other sources of self-efficacy. Teachers' descriptions of negative affective states often centered on recurrent episodes of stress, feeling burned out, feeling defeated, which may make these feelings were more salient to teachers and perhaps more directly related to self-efficacy than positive affective/physiological states. Additionally, teachers' descriptions of positive mastery experiences and social persuasions often also implied positive affective/physiological states, such as observing a "lightbulb moment" when a student understands a concept (mastery experience) or receiving positive feedback from a mentor (social persuasion). Since we were most interested in how teachers used information from the various sources to inform their appraisals of self-efficacy, we focused our coding on explicit rather than implicit evidence of the sources. Our main study focused on teachers in their first 5 years of teaching. Fortunately, we were also able to extend the sample to include a smaller group of experienced Noyce teachers with 5+ years of experience. We are in the process of analyzing that data, but social cognitive theory suggests that we should see some differences based on experience. For example, mastery experiences tend to be particularly influential sources of self-efficacy during the early stages of learning a difficult task, so we might expect to see fewer references to mastery experiences among teachers with 5+ years in the classroom.

Wonderful - I look forward to learning more about your findings as your work progresses. In my own work with Noyce Scholars, we looked at self-efficacy using the STEBI and MTEBI (you may be familiar?), so am interested in this instrument you used. We found overall self-efficacy toward teaching science and/or math to be (comparatively) low upon entering the teacher prep program, then it was significantly higher upon graduation and before teaching, and then it dropped after their first year of teaching, not quite to where it was at the start of the program, but still, they had lower self-efficacy toward teaching after classroom experience! Real-world experience took some of their confidence away maybe?

Thank you, Ann. Yes, we have seen similar results in other research projects regarding self-efficacy using the same instruments.The real-world experience definitely has an impact on their self-efficacy. In this study, the teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) was used (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001). It is also a validated instrument.

Hi HollyLynne - Great questions. We didn't find significant differences in self-efficacy by level or discipline. We also haven't noticed any clear differences in the sources identified by grade level or discipline, but we are continuing to explore teachers' responses to the open-ended questions for any patterns. I should note that because the Noyce program focuses on recruiting and supporting STEM teachers, nearly all of the teachers in our sample are either high school or middle school math or science teachers, so we are somewhat limited in conclusions we can draw about variations in self-efficacy across levels and subjects. 

Thanks for the repy. I like that most of your sample is middle and high school teachers, as those teachers often have more focused mastery experiences in their content area (math or science).  Did any aspects of your survey ask about specific SE related to the content they teach?  I am sure the general teacher SE instrument was content-neutral. But wondering if you added any questions specific to SE in teahcing disciplinary content (or perhaps this could be a follow-up).  A few years ago, one of my graduate students and myself reported on preservice math teachers readiness to teach statistics in high school. We used a specific instrument about statistics teaching SE. See paper in JTE if interested. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022487117697918

I agree with you that self-efficacy to teach is an important construct to examine in our research as well as to establish ways to support the development of positive SE in our work with STEM teachers. Thanks for your strong contribution to this area!

Hi Hollylynne - We didn't include content-specific self-efficacy items, mainly because the self-efficacy instrument was part of a much longer survey and we wanted to keep it manageable. Fortunately, the TSES has a short form that has also been validated, so we used that. I'll take a look at that JTE article - sounds interesting! 

Thank you, Jennifer. In terms of the connection between self-efficacy and Noyce program characteristics, we are still analyzing the data. We just completed some follow up interviews with Noyce teachers, and one of the focuses is exploring Noyce program influence on self-efficacy. The other part of the study is related to social network analysis. The results suggest there are moderate to large correlations between specific Noyce Program characteristics and network measures (teacher support network), suggesting that Noyce Programs that include these characteristics (mentoring, support for the professional conferences, student teaching experience in high-need) are more effective for building support networks for new teachers. We are also dicing the sample further to look at more subgroups such as novice teachers, science versus math teachers etc. Currently working on a few publications that we hope to get out by Fall.

Hi Beth - 

Teachers in our study are primarily middle and high school teachers. We haven't found clear differences or patterns by grade level, but we are still exploring the data. Your note about department size is interesting. In open-ended responses, many teachers do discuss support (or lack thereof) as influencing their confidence. Our larger exploratory study is using social network analysis to look at relationships between teachers' personal networks, Noyce program characteristics, self-efficacy, and retention. We are in the process of analyzing this data, but we may have findings related to teachers' networks and support and their self-efficacy soon. 

Thanks for the response Jessica. There are so many ways to explore the data. One of the reasons this work is so exciting:) 

Our study actually includes teachers from 60 NSF Noyce programs across the country. As the Noyce program focuses on recruiting and supporting STEM teachers, about 90% of the teachers in our study are either math or science teachers. You can learn more about the NSF Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program at https://www.nsfnoyce.org/ . 

Thank you, Mariana. The study also has social network analysis part too, we are currently finishing up the analysis. We are still working through the data, including looking at subgroups, but for the quantitative analysis the subgroups are very small, we might able to look at the group differences in our qual. data. We are also in the process of publishing.

Thank you! I'd love to read your reports and/or publications.

Hi Lisa - Thank you for your kind words. As a Noyce Track 4 Research project, our study focused on Noyce scholars. We didn't collect data on student outcomes or direct measures of teaching effectiveness in this particular exploratory study, but there interesting research documenting relationships between self-efficacy and student outcomes and effectiveness. For those interested in these links, I suggest Klassen and Tze's meta-analysis:

Klassen, R. M., & Tze, V. M. (2014). Teachers’ self-efficacy, personality, and teaching effectiveness: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 12, 59-76.