Environmental Factors for the Advancement of Teachers’ Self-Efficacy in Professional Development

Abstract

There is a shifting paradigm in gifted education from person-based approaches (i.e., identifying giftedness) to process-based approaches (i.e., transacting giftedness). This new framework is centered on enriching educational opportunities that will make the process meaningful (i.e., gifted) to everyone in a setting. However, little is known about how this renewed perspective can be applied in teacher professional development. In line with the socio-ecological models, our study aims to identify the best appropriate model to describe teacher self-efficacy (i.e., the dependent variable in the study) as professional development from an ecological perspective and to propose an ecologically intelligent school (EIS) for the advancement of self-efficacy. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed to create a model using TALIS 2018 dataset. Afterward, indices of goodness-of-fit criteria were examined for each model. The results indicate that there is a complex ecological background, in that various factors affect the dependent variable. Model 3 was determined as the most suitable model that can be proposed as an ecologically intelligent school (EIS) for the advancement of self-efficacy. The factors within the three layers of the socio-ecological model—communication with teachers, communication with students, school climate, and feeling valued by the national level—altogether created an appropriate model explaining teacher professional development, regarding self-efficacy.

Teacher innovativeness: The effect of self-efficacy, transformational leadership, and school climate

“…Theoretically, it can be explained that efficacy can encourage innovation because the teacher has high confidence to carry out tasks successfully and has appropriate emotional management skills (Gkontelos et al, 2023). This follows previous research, which stated that efficacy is significant for teachers (Buri & Moè, 2020), and teacher self-efficacy can improve education quality (Hajovsky et al, 2020;Saglam et al, 2023;Wang et al, 2022).…”

The factors explaining reading success of academically gifted readers through the ecological model

“…However, both methods have their own problems. For example, the deletion method may skew the sample size; and the imputation method, on the other hand, might not represent the true responses (Saglam et al, 2023). Furthermore, research has demonstrated that ignoring missing data in the analysis is more robust than scoring missing items as wrong responses in many situations (Finch, 2008; Rose et al, 2010).…”