Investigation of Pedagogical Belief Systems and Teacher Efficacy of Teachers in Turkey

Abstract

Pedagogical belief systems and the teacher efficacy could be used as a key concept to evaluate the teacher's pedagogical background. Therefore, this study aims to examine pedagogical belief systems and the teacher efficacy of teachers, especially in science and art centers (BİLSEM). The sample of the study consists of 388 teachers were selected by convenience sampling method. The findings of the study show that the gender and experience variables don't make any significant difference in teacher's pedagogical belief systems and teacher efficacy. Besides affiliation variable makes a significant difference in teacher's pedagogical belief systems but make no significant difference in their teacher efficacy except for their teaching skills. Independent variable importance analysis shows that affiliation is the most important factor for pedagogical belief systems in comparison to experience and gender dimensions. Independent variable importance analysis shows that experience is the most important factor for teacher efficacy in comparison to experience and gender dimensions. Independent variable importance shows that the most important factor is the guidance for sub-dimensions of teacher efficacy in terms of neural networks for explaining pedagogical belief systems. The second one is the assessment and evaluation and motivation. Moreover, all the sub-dimensions of the learnercentered approach are in low level positive significant correlations with the pedagogical belief systems. But no correlation is found with the teacher-centered approach except assessment and evaluation dimension. According to the findings, the learner-centered approach is the most important dimension of pedagogical belief systems in terms of neural networks for explaining teacher efficacy. Therefore a new model was created based on this fact so that path analysis results show that there is a causal connection from learner-centered approach to guidance, behavioral-ınstructional-management, motivation, and teaching skills dimensions to some extend.