Emotional intelligence and self-efficacy are considered two of the most fundamental teachers' characteristics to create positive effects on students. Recent research on teacher efficacy has turned from a focus on mastery of content area and lesson plan development to the identification of teacher beliefs and the emotional self-regulation required for teaching and student learning. The purpose of this research was examined whether emotional intelligence abilities influence teacher efficacy. The relationship between teacher gender, length of teaching experience and academic formation with emotional intelligence abilities is also analyzed. The sample comprised 634 Portuguese school teachers. Data sources included the Emotional Skills and Competence Questionnaire for Teachers, and the Teacher Efficacy in Classroom Management and Discipline Scale. The findings, using structural equation modeling, showed that school teachers with greater skills at perceiving, understanding, expressing, classifying, managing and regulating emotions demonstrated greater levels of teacher efficacy. Therefore teachers' emotional intelligence abilities positively influence teacher efficacy. Having teachers who are apt to perceive and manage emotions will be salutary for the personal development of students, as well as for structuring a positive and self-regulating learning environment. So the results support the teachers' emotional intelligence ability to job performance, and add to literature suggesting that to succeed in the complex and demanding school setting, teachers must develop the necessary emotional skills for enhancing their efficacy. This research contributes to the importance of being created in the teachers' academic training, the emotional education discipline.

This study presents and validates the psychometric characteristics of a short form of the Critical Thinking Self-assessment Scale (CTSAS). The original CTSAS was composed of six subscales representing the six components of Facione’s conceptualisation of critical thinking. The CTSAS short form kept the same structures and reduced the number of items from 115 in the original version, to 60. The CTSAS short form was tested with a sample of 531 higher education students from five countries (Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Romania, and Portugal) enrolled in different disciplinary fields (Business Informatics, Teacher Education, English as a Foreign Language, Business and Economics, and Veterinary Medicine). The confirmatory analysis was used to test the new instrument reliability, internal consistency, and construct validity. Both the models that hypothesized the six factors to be correlated and to tap into a second-order factor representing the complex concept of critical thinking, had acceptable fit to the data. The instrument showed strong internal consistency (α = 0.969) and strong positive correlations between skills and between the skills and the overall scale (p < 0.05). Despite the unbalanced sex distribution in the population (close to 75% females), the instrument retained its factorial structure invariance across sexes. Therefore, the new instrument shows adequate goodness of fit and retained stability and reliability, and is proposed as a valid and reliable means to evaluate and monitor critical thinking in university students.

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RESUMO O objetivo do presente estudo foi analisar os impactos decorrentes da componente tecnológica do projeto Promoção de Mudanças na Aprendizagem - Comunidades Escolares de Aprendizagem Gulbenkian XXI nos alunos, nos professores e nas práticas pedagógico-didáticas a partir do estudo das perceções de professores titulares de turma do primeiro ciclo do ensino básico que participaram no projeto. Foram realizadas entrevistas semiestruturadas com os professores. Os resultados sugerem melhorias no desenvolvimento profissional dos professores associados ao desenvolvimento das competências no uso da tecnologia, que referem que a utilização de tecnologia promove novas dinâmicas educativas que facilitam o processo de ensino-aprendizagem e promovem a melhoria nas aprendizagens dos alunos. A introdução de tecnologia na sala de aula requer aposta forte na formação de professores, empenho e dedicação por parte destes.