Efficacy Perceptions of Preservice and Inservice Teachers in China: Insights Concerning Culture and Measurement

Measuring Teacher Sense of Efficacy: Insights and Recommendations Concerning Scale Design and Data Analysis from Research with Preservice and Inservice Teachers in China

“…Although the representativeness of the samples in this research cannot be guaranteed and there is acknowledged item redundancy as well as constricted construct coverage, we believe that the data we obtained provide a sufficiently solid foundation for exploring TSE, within a framework consonant with the TSES, among Chinese PSTs and ISTs because of the sizeable number and heterogeneity of participants, removal of dubious responses, high retention rates, and small amount of missing data. We have conducted some exploration of that nature in a subsequent publication (Ma & Trevethan, 2020) in which we acknowledge that items from the TSES are confined to a sense of efficacy for teaching (SET)-the latter being deliberately focused on classroom activities rather than on broader aspects of teachers' professional lives. In conducting that research as well as in conducting this present study, we believe that, as Malinen (2016, p. 122) has argued, "a closer collaboration with international researchers and bringing research more accessible to non-Chinese readers would benefit both international and mainland Chinese research.…”

Influence of Response-Option Combinations when Measuring Sense of Efficacy for Teaching: Trivial, or Substantial and Substantive?

“…Furthermore, parallel results emerge in other studies with larger and more diverse samples. For example, when we used a scale similar to Version A in research with samples of 366 preservice and 276 inservice teachers from China (Ma and Trevethan, 2020), the means of their SET scores also lay close to the option-range midpoint. So, also, did the means of 246 Norwegian inservice teachers on several SET subscales in research by Skaalvik and Skaalvik (2007) and the means of 348 Italian inservice teachers in research by Avanzi et al (2013)-with both studies having the same combination of response options as Version A.…”

“…In this study, we examined the overlapping effect of number of response options and option labels when assessing sense of efficacy for teaching (SET) 1 -a topic that we had previously researched in Australia and China (see Ma and Cavanagh, 2018;Ma et al, 2019;Ma and Trevethan, 2020). We had noticed differences in results that we suspected might be attributable to differences in combinations of the response options that we had offered participants.…”

“…Our choice of seven options was based on recommendations that the optimal number of options is seven (Carifio and Perla, 2007;Krosnick and Presser, 2010) or either five or seven (Robinson, 2018) as well as the argument that the psychometric properties of scales do not improve with more than seven options (Nunnally, 1978). Placing labels above only the odd-numbered options conformed with the Norwegian Teacher's Self-Efficacy Scale (Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2007) and with our own research in China (Ma et al, 2019;Ma and Trevethan, 2020).…”