An Integrative Variable and Person-Centered Approach to Representing Teachers\u27 Self-Efficacy: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

There has been substantial scholarly attention given to teachers’ functioning over the past two decades. Much of this attention has been precipitated by accounts of increasing teacher burnout and attrition from the profession. Central to this scholarly focus has been the construct of teacher self-efficacy, which has been shown to be a predictor of important teacher outcomes. However, there remain several unresolved issues in the teacher self-efficacy literature that limit the utility of the construct for understanding teachers’ effective functioning. First, there is little clarity about the dimensional structure of teachers’ self-efficacy data. Second, little empirical work has been conducted to investigate the important tenet that teachers may be differentially efficacious across distinct domains manifested as distinct profiles of teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Furthermore, it is unclear whether such profile configurations generalize across countries with distinct cultural norms and educational systems. Adopting a integrative variable and person-centered, multidimensional perspective on teachers’ self-efficacy, the current study aimed to (a) examine a bifactorial representation of teachers’ self-efficacy data as a way to reconcile conflicting psychometric representation of the construct and (b), based on the bifactorial structure, identify different profiles of teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs in the U.S. and Brazil and examine the generalizability of the profiles across these groups. In addition, the study drew on social cognitive perspectives to posit gender and years of experience as predictors of teachers’ self-efficacy profile membership, and job satisfaction, teacher collaboration, and classroom disciplinary climate as distal outcomes of profile membership. Results revealed five teachers’ self-efficacy profiles in the US and Brazilian sample, which were not found to generalize. Profile membership was shown to be predicted in the U.S. and the Brazilian samples by teacher gender and years of experience, and job satisfaction, classroom disciplinary climate, and teacher collaboration were found to differ as a function of profile membership. Implications of the results for teachers’ self-efficacy theory and practice are discussed