The Mediating Effect of Academic Self-Efficacy in the Relationship between Middle School Students' Perceptions of Teaching Competencies and Math Achievement

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating effect of academic self-efficacy on the relationship between middle school students' perceptions of teaching competencies and math achievement. This study was based on the GEPS and used multi-level SEM to capture the hierarchical structure of the clustered data. Considering the limitations of previous empirical studies using SEM methodology to control the influences of confounding variables, this study included student and school-level covariates. Through model comparisons between two models: a model without covariates and the other model with both student and school-level covariates, the final research model was applied to analyze the effects of perceived teaching competencies and academic self-efficacy on academic achievement. The study yielded a number of interesting results. Firstly, after controlling for student and school-level variables, the direct effect of perceived teaching competencies on academic achievement was shown to be statistically significant. The indirect effect, or the mediating influence of academic self-efficacy, was also * This study is a revised version of presentation which was presented in 2016 ICER.

Impact of Competency and Self-esteem on the Teacher Engagement at Jinja City Primary Schools, Uganda

“…In addition, there are also studies that supported the above findings such as Rama and Sarada (2017), Sahay (2020), Singh (2018), Srinivasan and Pugalenthi (2020) who also reported that teacher competence significantly predicted self-esteem. On the other hand, the findings revealed that self-esteem partially mediated the link between teacher competence and engagement such as, Gebresilase and Zhao (2023), Huang et al (2022), Li et al (2022), Chang et al (2022), Achmad et al (2023), Kim et al (2017), Liu et al (2023) whose findings revealed that self-esteem mediated the link between teacher competence and engagement. Since the findings are in line with the majority of researchers, it can be inferred that self-esteem partially mediated the link between teacher competence and engagement.…”

“…Self-esteem has been considered as the mediator of teacher engagement because teachers feel engaged when they exhibit a high level of selfesteem (Pathardikar et al, 2022). Researchers (Gebresilase & Zhao, 2023;Huang et al, 2022;Li et al, 2022;Pathardikar & Srivastava, 2022;Mai, 2016;Chang et al, 2022;Achmad et al, 2023;Kim et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2023) tried to use selfesteem to mediate the relationship between teacher competence and engagement in their investigations. However, conceptual and population gaps emerged from the above investigations.…”

“…However, conceptual and population gaps emerged from the above investigations. For instance, studies (Liu et al, 2023& Mai, 2016 did not use self-esteem as the mediating variable in their investigations, even the study by Kim et al (2017) that used esteem as the mediator variable, mediated the link between students' perception and teacher competencies hence, there emerged the conceptual gap. Further, all the studies above were conducted outside the context of Ugandan primary schools, while others such as (Achmad et al, 2023;Pathardikar & Srivastava, 2022) were done outside the context of primary schools.…”