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Discovering the impact of reading coursework and discipline-specific mentorship on first-year teachers’ self-efficacy: a latent class analysis

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Abstract

Teacher self-efficacy is critical because it predicts teachers’ future behavior and impacts teacher turnover. Most teachers begin their career with moderate to high self-efficacy for teaching, but often experience a sharp decline during the first year of teaching. After the first year, their self-efficacy begins to increase but rarely rises to the level it was prior to beginning teaching. Therefore, examining first-year teachers’ self-efficacy is extremely important. Previous research generally depicts teachers as a homogeneous group, relying on variable-centered approaches and including self-efficacy as a scaling score, which may not be applicable at the individual level. Simply extending findings from the variable-centered analyses is insufficient. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to examine the heterogeneous profiles of first-year teachers’ self-efficacy from the 2011–2012 Schools and Staffing Survey and to investigate how self-efficacy profiles are related to teacher training at the individual level. Using latent class analyses, we found three statistically distinctive classes within self-efficacy: high, moderate, and low. Regardless of teaching assignments, teachers who completed reading content courses during preparation programs and received discipline-specific mentoring during their first year dominated a higher level of self-efficacy. We conclude that these two factors are essential to preparing and retaining high-quality teachers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Rd Unit 1020, Storrs, CT, 06269, USA

    Luxi Feng

  2. Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Alabama, Graves 208A, Box 870231, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487, USA

    Tracey S. Hodges

  3. Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture, Texas A&M University, 4232 TAMU, 540 Ross Street, College Station, TX, 77843, USA

    Hersh C. Waxman & R. Malatesha Joshi

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  1. Luxi Feng
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Feng, L., Hodges, T.S., Waxman, H.C. et al. Discovering the impact of reading coursework and discipline-specific mentorship on first-year teachers’ self-efficacy: a latent class analysis. Ann. of Dyslexia 69, 80–98 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-018-00167-1

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