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Durability of Changes in Self‐efficacy ofPreservice Primary TeachersDavid Palmer aa University of Newcastle , AustraliaPublished online: 23 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: David Palmer (2006) Durability of Changes in Self‐efficacy of PreservicePrimary Teachers, International Journal of Science Education, 28:6, 655-671, DOI:10.1080/09500690500404599
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International Journal of Science EducationVol. 28, No. 6, 12 May 2006, pp. 655–671
ISSN 0950-0693 (print)/ISSN 1464-5289 (online)/06/060655–17© 2006 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/09500690500404599
RESEARCH REPORT
Durability of Changes in Self-efficacy of Preservice Primary Teachers
David Palmer*University of Newcastle, AustraliaTaylor and Francis LtdTSED_A_140442.sgm10.1080/09500690500404599International Journal of Science Education0950-0693 (print)/1464-5289 (online)Original Article2005Taylor & [email protected]
Many preservice primary teachers initially have a low self-efficacy, or belief in their ability to teachscience, but well-designed science education courses can produce significant positive changes inefficacy beliefs. However, the extent to which the belief changes are durable, or maintained overtime, is yet to be established. The purpose of this study was to investigate the durability of changesin preservice primary teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Their science teaching self-efficacy wasmeasured at the beginning and end of a science methods course, and then after a delay period of9 months. Interviews were carried out 1 year after the end of the course. The results indicated thatpositive changes in self-efficacy occurred as a result of the course, and these high levels were stillpresent after the delay period. Having an opportunity to teach science in primary school was asignificant factor in consolidating efficacy levels after the methods course.
Introduction
Albert Bandura (1977) proposed the concept of “self-efficacy” as a theory of behav-ioural change. The self-efficacy of an individual refers to that person’s judgementsabout how well they can, “organise and execute courses of action required to dealwith prospective situations that contain many ambiguous, unpredictable and oftenstressful, elements” (Bandura, 1981, pp. 200–201). It therefore represents an indi-vidual’s belief about his/her ability to successfully execute a course of action in adifficult or challenging situation. Bandura (1977) described two critical componentsof self-efficacy: the first was “efficacy expectation”, which represents the belief inone’s ability to successfully perform the behaviour; the second was the “response-outcome expectancy”, or the belief that the performance of the behaviour will have adesirable outcome. Self-efficacy is an accurate predictor of performance—peoplewith low self-efficacy about an activity will tend to avoid that activity, whereas
*School of Education, University of Newcastle, NSW 2308, Australia. Email: [email protected]
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people with high self-efficacy will make vigorous and persistent efforts and will there-fore be more likely to complete the task successfully. Bandura (1981) emphasizedthat self-efficacy is highly context dependent, so a person may have a high self-efficacy with respect to one task but a low self-efficacy with respect to another.
There are four principal sources of efficacy expectation: mastery experiences,vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological and affective states(Bandura, 1997). The most powerful of these are mastery experiences, which areprevious successes in dealing with a particular challenge. A strong sense of efficacy isdeveloped through repeated successes in situations that require some perseverancein overcoming obstacles. When a person has built up a resilient sense of efficacyfrom such situations, they can quickly rebound from occasional failures. On theother hand, vicarious experiences occur when people see others successfullyperforming a difficult task. This type of modelling is particularly relevant whenpeople have little previous experience in the task at hand. When people see compe-tent models perform successfully then this encourages the belief that they would beable to master similar situations. The third source of efficacy information is verbalpersuasion, which occurs when people are told that they have the capability tohandle a certain situation: “People who are persuaded verbally that they possess thecapabilities to master given tasks are likely to mobilise greater effort and sustain itthan if they harbour self-doubts and dwell on personal deficiencies when difficultiesarise” (Bandura, 1997, p. 101). The fourth source of efficacy expectation is throughphysiological and affective states, as people tend to partly rely on these factors whendetermining their capability in a situation. For example, people with low self-efficacymay regard emotions such as stress, anxiety, and fear to be responses to their owninadequacies, and this may feed these negative emotions until they become over-whelming. Other people may regard these emotions as perfectly normal responsesand do not let them interfere with their performance of the task.
With regard to the profession of teaching, the aforementioned findings suggestthat teachers’ behaviour in classrooms would be highly influenced by their ownperceptions of their ability to teach (efficacy expectations), as well as a belief thattheir teaching strategies would be effective (response-outcome expectancies).Bandura (1997) reviewed a number of studies of teacher behaviour and found thatteachers who have a high sense of self-efficacy have a strong commitment to teach-ing, tend to regard learning problems as surmountable, make extensive efforts tomotivate students, devote more class time to academic work, provide students withguidance and praise for their accomplishments, and in general are associated withhigher levels of student achievement. On the other hand, teachers with low self-efficacy spend less time on instruction, do not persevere when students experiencedifficulties, have an authoritarian approach, make little effort to motivate students,and have a weak commitment to teaching the subject matter. Teachers’ self-efficacybeliefs may vary from subject to subject, so a teacher who is highly efficacious in anEnglish lesson might not be as confident in a science lesson.
Self-efficacy is a particularly important issue for preservice primary teachers.Many of these people had negative experiences of science throughout their own
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schooling, and consequently have developed negative attitudes towards it (Mulhol-land & Wallace, 1996; Tosun, 2000). They typically have a poor science knowledge(Lloyd et al., 1998; Stevens & Wenner, 1996; Trundle, Atwood, & Christopher,2002) and lack confidence in their ability to teach it (Appleton, 1995; Jarrett, 1999;Mulholland & Wallace; Palmer, 2001; Tosun, 2000; van Zee, Lay, & Roberts,2003). When they graduate and become primary teachers, they can be expected toeither teach science poorly, using strategies based on reading and writing, or elseavoid it altogether (Appleton & Kindt, 1999; Bencze & Hodson, 1999). On theother hand, those graduates who have higher perceived efficacy for science teachingtend to make better progress as beginning teachers of science (Appleton & Kindt,2002) and can be expected to utilize high-quality, inquiry techniques (Anderson,Dragsted, Evans, & Sørensen, 2004).
A considerable amount of research has therefore focussed on how to improve self-efficacy among preservice primary teachers. Simply increasing the amount of sciencecontent in their courses can have surprisingly little effect on students’ confidence toteach science (Moore & Watson, 1999; Schoon & Boone, 1998). In the study byWatters and Ginns (2000) students felt that their science content course had beenmuch less effective in developing understanding and confidence than had the scienceeducation course.
A number of other studies have found that science education courses (i.e., thosethat concentrate on how to teach primary science) can be very successful in thisregard (Appleton, 1995; Cantrell, Young, & Moore, 2003; Palmer, 2001), andseveral course factors have been identified that have the potential to increase the self-efficacy of the students. These include the use of an inquiry approach (Bohning &Hale, 1998; Jarrett, 1999; Posnanski, 2002), extensive use of hands-on activities(Butts, Koballa Jr., & Elliot, 1997), group investigations (van Zee et al., 2003), activ-ities relevant to the primary classroom (Watters & Ginns, 2000), relating concepts tothe real world (Kelly, 2000), practice teaching as a component of the methods course(Cannon & Scharmann, 1996; Cantrell et al., 2003; Kelly, 2000), tutors modellingteaching techniques (Rice & Roychoudhury, 2003), and a classroom environmentthat emphasizes fun and success (Watters & Ginns, 2000).
These studies have convincingly demonstrated that well-designed science methodcourses can effectively induce positive changes in science teaching self-efficacy.However, these studies have provided no information about how long the beliefchanges might persist after completion of the course. It might be hypothesized, forexample, that students’ attitudes and beliefs may be temporarily improved at the endof an interesting and well-presented methods course, but they may decline again asstudents complete their other (non-science) studies prior to graduating. It is notunusual for 1 year to elapse between finishing the science education course and theend of the programme, so there is the potential that newly-gained self-efficacy maybe eroded with the passage of time. This is an important consideration in socialcognitive theory. Bandura (1997) has distinguished four basic processes of changewith respect to self-efficacy: acquisition, generality, durability, and resilience.Acquisition involves the initial development of self-beliefs, generality relates to how
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widely those beliefs can be applied, durability refers to how well the changes aremaintained over time, and resilience involves the ability to bounce back fromnegative experiences. The purpose of the present paper is to focus on the constructof durability.
The research question for this study was as follows: To what extent are positivechanges in self-efficacy maintained over time after the completion of a science methodscourse?
Method
The study involved a pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test design.The participants were asked to write an anonymous identifier (e.g., their mother’sgiven names) on their test sheets so as to enable each individual’s responses to beplaced together.
Participants
The participants were preservice primary teachers who were enrolled in a one-semester science methods course at a university in south-eastern Australia. For thisstudy, it was important to track individuals from pre-test to immediate post-test anddelayed post-test, so it was decided that only those individuals who participated inall three testing phases would be included in the data. Originally there were over 150students enrolled in the course, but unfortunately the majority of them could not beincluded in the data—either because they did not attend one or more of the testingsessions, or because their test sheets could not be reliably paired due to them notusing a consistent identifier, or because they did not complete all the items in thequestionnaire. Complete data was collected for only 55 students (this group will bereferred to as the tracked group). Although this was a relatively small sample for aquantitative analysis, the study used multiple data sources (formal surveys, informalsurveys, and individual interviews) to provide cross-checks of the main trends.Finally, mean responses from a further 66 students who completed the pre-test and/or immediate post-test only (an untracked group) were calculated to check whetherthe tracked group were different in any way to the rest of the class. In the remainderof this paper, the focus will be on the tracked group unless otherwise indicated.
The majority of the 55 students in the tracked group were aged 20–25 years, and86% of them were female. These students were beginning the third year of their 4-year programme (the science methods course was in the first semester of the thirdyear). Their on-campus studies were scheduled to end half way through the fourthyear (i.e., 1 year after the end of the methods course) when the students typicallystarted an in-school internship, which was the final component of their programme.Prior to this study, most of the students had completed a science foundations coursethe previous year. The foundations course had been taught by science staff ratherthan education staff, and was designed to improve the students’ content knowledgein the domains of physics, chemistry, and biology.
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The Science Methods Course
The science methods course was a compulsory component of the primary teachereducation programme. Its main purpose was to give students an understanding ofteaching methods for science, but it was also intended to have a positive influence ontheir self-efficacy.
The course was presented as a 1-h lecture and a 1-h workshop/tutorial each weekfor 13 weeks. Much of the course was concerned with techniques for teaching partic-ular curriculum topics such as sound, light, magnetism, movement, astronomy,water, air, plants, and animals. However, it also covered study of science processskills, assessment strategies, student misconceptions, safety issues, and generalteaching strategies such as investigating and problem-solving.
Several techniques for improving the students’ self-efficacy were used throughoutthe course. Hands-on activities and group work were intensively utilized nearly everyweek. In many cases, the hands-on activities involved group inquiry in which thestudents designed and implemented their own investigations. The sessions alsoinvolved extensive modelling of teaching strategies similar to those proposed for chil-dren. The tutor modelled science explanations that contained a relatively low level ofcomplexity and that minimized scientific jargon, in order to make them easy tounderstand at primary level. All of the content and activities were chosen to be directlyrelevant to primary classrooms, by emphasizing relatively simple concepts, and byusing hands-on activities that were easy to manipulate and that used everyday materialsrather than specialized scientific equipment. The course also contained an introduc-tory practice teaching component in which students planned, taught, and evaluateda hands-on science lesson to a primary school child in a one-to-one situation.
Data Collection
Formal surveys. The instrument used for the pre-test and the post-tests was theScience Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument (STEBI-B) developed by Enochs andRiggs (1990), who designed it to measure the science teaching self-efficacy of preser-vice primary teachers. The STEBI-B was a 23-item, Likert-type instrumentcomprising two scales: the Personal Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Scale(PSTEB), which measured efficacy expectations; and the Science TeachingOutcome Expectancy Scale (STOE), which measured response-outcome expect-ancy. The PSTEB consisted of 13 items that questioned students about factors suchas their perceived ability to understand how to teach science, improve as a teacher ofscience, understand and explain science concepts, and implement science experi-ments. The STOE consisted of 10 items that concerned the effectiveness of scienceteaching in having positive effects on students’ grades, achievement, and interest.Examples of the items are presented in Table 1. Each item in the survey was linkedto five choices (strongly agree, agree, uncertain, disagree, strongly disagree). Some of theitems were worded positively and others negatively. The items were scored 5, 4, 3, 2or 1, in which 5 was the most positive response and 1 was the most negative
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response. Enochs and Riggs carried out a reliability analysis in which the PSTEproduced an alpha coefficient of 0.9 and the STOE coefficient was 0.76. Factoranalysis revealed that in both scales all items loaded highly with their own scale. TheSTEBI-B was validated for use in an Australian context by Ginns, Watters, Tulip,and Lucas (1995), who found Cronbach alpha values of 0.73 (for the PSTEB) and0.68 (for the STOE).
The STEBI-B was administered at the beginning of the first session of the methodscourse (the pre-test) by a tutor who was not associated with the course. It was againadministered 13 weeks later, at the end of the course (the immediate post-test). Thedelayed post-test occurred 9 months after the immediate post-test (i.e., in the finalyear of their 4-year programme). The students had no formal science studies duringthe period between the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test. A repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with post-hoc pairwise comparisons wasused to compare pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test means for eachscale. This was used to determine whether the students’ self-efficacy had changedover the course, and whether the changes were maintained over time.
Where the ANOVA showed a significant difference, a further analysis was carriedout to determine the effect size. This was calculated by finding the differencebetween the group means and dividing it by the mean standard deviation. When thistechnique is used, an effect size of 0.8 or more is large, while 0.5 is moderate and 0.2is small (Cantrell et al., 2003).
A separate analysis of the STEBI-B was then used to identify those students whowere initially negative, and to track their changes in self-efficacy throughout thestudy. It was important to do this because it is the students with negative beliefs whoare of most concern to researchers—negative self-efficacy would be expected toseverely impact on future science teaching, so one measure of the effectiveness of thecourse would be that negative beliefs had been eliminated. It was therefore necessaryto analyse both the group results and the individual results in order to investigate theimpact of the course. It was decided that a score of three for an item would representa neutral response, and in the PSTEB there were 13 items, so a total of 39 wouldrepresent the neutral mark, and a negative response would be indicated when astudent’s score was more than one standard deviation below this point. In theSTOE, there were 10 items, so the neutral point was 30, and a negative response
Table 1. Examples of items in the STEBI-B (Enochs & Riggs, 1990)
PSTEB scale I know the steps necessary to teach science concepts effectively.I will find it difficult to explain to students why science experiments work.When teaching science I will usually welcome student questions.
STOE scale The inadequacy of a student’s science background can be overcome by good teaching.Students’ achievement in science is directly related to their teacher’s effectiveness in science teaching.If parents comment that their child is showing more interest in science at school, it is probably due to the performance of the child’s teacher.
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would be more than one standard deviation below this point. The proportion ofstudents with negative self-efficacy was then calculated.
Informal survey. The informal survey was carried out 9 months after the courseended (at the same time as the delayed post-test). It was designed to identify anyfactors that had occurred during the delay period that may have affected theirconfidence to teach science. The students were asked to respond to the followingopen-ended items:
1. Since the end of the science course last year, has anything increased yourconfidence to teach science? (Please explain.)
2. Since the end of the science course last year, has anything decreased yourconfidence to teach science? (Please explain.)
The students’ written comments were categorized and the proportion of students ineach category was calculated.
Interviews. Individual, audiotaped interviews were carried out with 18 volunteerstudents. Due to privacy requirements it was not possible to tell how many of thesewere in the tracked group of 55. The interviews lasted about 15 min each, and tookplace 12 months after the end of the course. The interviews allowed students toreflect upon any changes in their science teaching confidence over the period of thecourse and during the year since the end of the course, and to identify factors thatmay have influenced their confidence since the course ended. The students wereasked to describe what their level of science teaching confidence had been like beforethe course, then after the course, and then at the present time (1 year later). Thestudents were asked questions such as “Before the methods course, was your confi-dence to teach science positive or neutral or negative?” in order to clarify the level ofconfidence that the students felt at each stage. The terms “positive”, “neutral”, and“negative” were used instead of other terms such as “low”, “medium”, or “high” inorder to facilitate comparison with the quantitative data. The students were alsoasked to describe any factors that they believed had affected their confidence duringthe delay period after the end of the course.
Results
Changes in Self-efficacy During the Course
Formal survey data. The results of the repeated-measures ANOVA are presented inTable 2. There were main effects for both scale (F [1,54] = 317.396, p < .001) andtime (F [1,108] = 91.083, p < .001). The scale effect indicated that there was adifference between the scale means, which was to be expected given the design of theinstrument. The interesting result, however, was the effect for time—post-hoc(Scheffé) testing indicated that the pre-test means for both scales were significantly
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lower than the immediate post-test means (p < .01). This indicated that both thePSTEB and STOE significantly increased over the period of the course.
The means and standard deviations for each scale are presented in Table 3. Theeffect sizes calculated for the pre-test versus immediate post-test means for eachscale were 1.74 (PSTEB) and 0.89 (STOE). In both cases, the effect sizes werelarge, above 0.8, indicating that the course had substantially increased personalscience teaching efficacy beliefs as well as outcome expectancy beliefs. The resultsfrom the untracked group are also presented in Table 3. These students hadcompleted the pre-test and/or the immediate post-test, and the means for this groupwere strikingly similar to that of the tracked group. This implies that although thetracked group of 55 students was a relatively small sample, their results were typicalof the class as a whole.
The next step was to identify individual students whose self-efficacy was initiallynegative. For the PSTEB the standard deviation in the pre-test was 6.6, so any scorebelow 32.4 was taken to be negative. On this basis, only four students (7%) had anegative score. In the STOE the pre-test standard deviation was 4.3, so any scorebelow 25.7 was regarded as negative. This applied to only one student (2%). For allfive students however, the scores in the immediate post-test had increased to abovethe neutral mark, indicating a positive change in their attitude—in fact, four of thesestudents had immediate post-test scores of more than one standard deviation aboveneutral, indicating that their self-efficacy beliefs had changed from negative to positive.
Table 2. Repeated-measures ANOVA results
EffectSums of squares
Degrees of freedom Mean squares F value P value
Intercept 616118.4 1 616118.4 9693.024 0.0000Error 3432.4 54 63.6
Scale 13504.0 1 13504.0 317.396 0.0000Error 2297.5 54 42.5
Time 3327.1 2 1663.6 91.083 0.0000Error 1972.5 108 18.3
Scale × time 527.2 2 263.6 21.507 0.0000Error 1323.8 108 12.3
Table 3. Mean (standard deviation) for each scale
PSTEB STOE
Tracked Untracked Tracked Untracked
Pre-test 43 (6.6) 42 (6.3) 34 (4.3) 34 (4.2)Immediate post-test 53 (4.9) 53 (4.7) 38 (4.7) 38 (4)Delayed post-test 52 (6.1) 38 (4.5)
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Interview data. The interview data also provided evidence of positive changes inself-efficacy. Of the 18 students interviewed, 13 stated that prior to the course theirconfidence to teach science had been negative, three stated that they would havebeen between negative and neutral, two stated that they would have been neutral,and none stated that they would have felt positive. The following are two responsesto the question “Before the science course was your confidence to teach sciencepositive or neutral or negative?”:
Probably negative. I’ve had experiences through primary school and high school scienceand always found it really quite boring and not relevant. In teaching in my practicums Iwould never have approached science at all because I just put it in the too hard basket.
I wasn’t looking forward to it. I hated science from my school experience and I thought“Oh no. This [science course] is approaching and I won’t perform as well in it”.
However, all 18 students stated that by the end of the course their confidence was inthe positive range, rather than neutral or negative. The following are selected excerpts:
Right at the beginning I wasn’t looking forward to teaching science within the primaryschool. I didn’t feel confident that I had enough knowledge and skills in it. But duringthe course I found it very helpful. It was lots of practical ideas and how to go about it—it’s one of my favourite KLAs [subjects] now.
I didn’t really like it in school myself, but then as I went through the science course Ifound out a lot of interesting things and learnt how it was actually very easy to teach it tokids. [What was your confidence like after the course?] It was positive.
Before I actually did the science course at uni I wasn’t 100% on science. I was worriedabout teaching kids science because I didn’t know enough myself. But after the sciencetuts that we had last year I got so much information from that because the tutor gave uslots of hands-on things to do and we constantly did activities in every tut that we coulduse in the classroom and it made it easier for me to understand it myself so therefore Ican teach the kids.
The Delayed Post-testing Phase
Formal survey data. As Table 3 shows, a comparison of immediate post-test anddelayed post-test indicates very little difference in either the PSTEB or STOEmeans, and post-hoc analysis showed no significant differences. This implies that,over the 9 months since the end of the course, there was no change in the students’science teaching self-efficacy for the group as a whole. Furthermore, the studentswho had negative self-efficacy before the course (i.e., in the pre-test) all still hadscores of neutral levels or above, indicating that their positive changes in self-efficacyhad been maintained.
However, when the scores of individual students were further examined it wasfound that some interesting changes had taken place. For the purpose of this analysisit was decided that any difference of one standard deviation or more in immediatepost-test versus delayed post-test scores would represent a substantial change. Onthis basis, it was found that the students could be placed into two groups: those whodid not substantially change (73% of the students), and those who did (27%). Of
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those who did change, some increased their scores in the delayed post-test whileothers decreased—in roughly comparable numbers. Some possible reasons for whyand how the students maintained their levels of self-efficacy were elicited in theinterviews, as follows.
Interview data. The interview data provided a range of different responses regardingthe students’ confidence after the delay period of 1 year. The majority ofinterviewees (13 of the 18) stated that their confidence to teach science was just aspositive as it had been when they had just finished the course. Most of these students(9 of the 13) stated that they had taught science during a practicum in a primaryschool, and this had helped to maintain their confidence at a high level (the 4-weekpracticum had occurred immediately after the science methods course so it ended 11months prior to the interviews). One student stated,
It’s still positive because in my last prac I got a chance to teach a few lessons on scienceand I really enjoyed it and had lots of fun. So I’m still positive in my attitude towards it… Being able to do it myself I found I was more confident teaching it.
The remaining four of the 13 had not taught science on practicum but their confidencewas still positive:
[The course] just gave me a different view on science—a positive view of science that Ididn’t know existed. There’s been nothing there [during the delay period] that hasbackfired on me to make me not think that way any more … At least I know on intern-ship I want to try these things out now, whereas before I wouldn’t have.
[Has anything happened during the past year to influence your confidence?] No notparticularly. Just the fact that you think “Well yeah it was easy enough”, and you’ve gotall the notes that you can fall back on to assist you with teaching. [Is your confidencejust as positive as it was when you finished the course?] Yeah. It’s changed my attitudetotally towards it.
All of the remaining five interviewees said that their confidence had changed. Twosaid that it was actually higher than it had been a year previously. This was due tohaving taught science in the practicum:
On my last prac I actually did a science unit which the kids absolutely loved. And I usedsome of the stuff from the lectures—used that as a basis for how to present science in afun, interesting and educational way to kids. [What is your confidence to teach sciencelike now?] I think it’s probably even more positive than when I finished the coursebecause now I’m looking out for resources in that field as well. Before the course I reallydidn’t think of science as a subject that I’d really be interested in. I am now and thatreflects in my resources that I’ve accumulated over the time. [Having the opportunity toteach it at your prac school—did that help to make you more positive?] Yes definitely. Ithink like everything the course gave me an understanding and a foundation, and thenas a result of my prac my confidence grew, and then as a result of that I’ve reallydeveloped as a teacher within science.
The other three students said that their confidence had declined. One had dropped alittle in confidence but was still positive:
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Not as positive as at the end of the science course, but definitely not anywhere nearnegative or neutral. It’s still positive—a little bit less but only because I’ve forgotten a lotof the things. But I do have the literature at home and the details of the hands-onexperiences and activities that you can provide to kids. I’m sure just reading throughthose again it would be fine.
Another student’s confidence had declined to a neutral level:
My confidence might have slightly dropped a little bit going into internship thinkingabout science. If I had been going into teaching as soon as I finished that course I prob-ably would have been more excited and motivated but because of the lapse of time Iprobably feel a little bit incapable of presenting that to the class.
Finally, the third student reported that her confidence had dropped back to a negativelevel:
Now I don’t have it fresh in my mind. If I was to teach it I would have to go back andlook at my notes and look at the activities we did to try to refresh my mind. [So has yourconfidence dropped a bit?] Yes. It’s dropped a bit yeah. I’d be leaning a little bittowards the more negative again. [So you’re in the negative range?] Yes. [Has anythinginfluenced your confidence in science during the past year?] Just time passing. Nothingreally has happened. [Did you do science in your last prac?] No.
Interestingly, the three students who reported decreases in their confidence werealike in that none of them had taught science in school during the delay period. Insummary, the interviews indicated that, after 1 year, most of the students still hadpositive confidence to teach science. The opportunity to teach science in a schoolwas a very important factor for many of the students in reinforcing or even raisingtheir confidence. Some students who did not have a practicum teaching experiencewere still able to maintain high levels of confidence, but for others the passage oftime effectively decreased their confidence to varying degrees.
Informal survey data. Forty-seven students (85% of the tracked group) providedaffirmative comments in answer to the question “Since the end of your sciencecourse last year has anything increased your confidence to teach science?” The onlyfactor mentioned by the students was having the opportunity to teach science inschools. Many of them mentioned how successful the lessons were when they taughtscience in their practicum, and this appeared to have been important in consolidat-ing their confidence. The following are some selected responses:
Yes. Simple ideas to teach and use have been a great help. I have used them in the class-room and the kids loved them.
On prac I put many ideas from the course into practice and was very impressed withhow well they went and how interested the students were. It was great fun! I amextremely confident (after this course) to teach primary science.
Due to the science course I had the confidence to teach practical science activities (withgreat results). To see how much the kids enjoy it helps to increase confidence.
Practicum provided a multitude of opportunities to employ activities learnt within thecourse within the classroom. All successful and the students loved them.
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A further three students (5%) responded “No” to the question, indicating that nothinghad increased their confidence in the intervening period.
Several students wrote comments about the science course itself, rather than theperiod after the course. Although this was not the intention of the survey, thesecomments were useful in confirming that significant changes in confidence hadoccurred as a result of the course. The following are some examples,
[The tutor’s] ability to teach science concepts in a fun and effective way. I thoroughlyenjoyed science and feel much more confident now in my ability to teach it.
The science subject made something that I thought impossible to teach possible.
Practical experiments and teaching methods. Knowing that it’s OK to not know theanswer and find it out together.
The science course took away my fear of teaching science. Now I feel that I am capableof teaching science effectively.
The strategies taught in science tutorials have given me confidence to teach science andto have a different attitude to science. I used to dislike science but now I think it will bea great subject to teach in K-6.
In response to the other question, “Since the end of the science course last year,has anything decreased your confidence to teach science?”, most of the students(58%) simply responded “No” and a further 33% did not write any response.However, five students (9%) wrote that due to the passage of time they may haveforgotten some course content. For example,
Yes. Just a lapse in time. I feel less familiar with the strategies I learnt last year. I havealso not observed any science lessons since then.
Yes. We have not ‘touched up’ on science so my confidence has decreased slightly.
The time that has lapsed since the completion of the course has affected my ability torecall the things that I found important to teaching science.
In summary, the informal surveys indicated that the opportunity to teach sciencein a school was an important factor in helping to maintain students’ confidence afterthe course had ended. Most of the students indicated that nothing had decreasedtheir confidence since the course ended, but a small number felt that the passage oftime had negatively impacted on them. Other comments provided additionalevidence that the science course had a major influence on the students’ confidenceto teach science.
Discussion
Initial Changes in Self-efficacy
The results for the pre-test and immediate post-test indicated that statistically signif-icant positive changes were recorded for both personal science teaching efficacybeliefs (PSTEB) and science teaching outcome expectancies (STOE) over theperiod of the course itself. This indicates that the course had increased students’
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beliefs about their ability to perform teaching behaviours (efficacy expectations) aswell as their beliefs that the teaching behaviours would have a desirable outcome(response-outcome expectancy). Thus, science teaching self-efficacy had increased,and this is consistent with other studies showing that science methods courses canpositively influence students’ confidence to teach science (Appleton, 1995; Cantrellet al., 2003; Palmer, 2001). However, although the pre-test versus immediate post-test results were significantly different, the question of whether the changes in self-efficacy were educationally significant (i.e., likely to have an impact on teaching/learning) must now be addressed. Although the effect size calculations showed thatthe differences were of a substantial size, this does not necessarily mean that thedifferences were educationally significant, as effect size is still a statistical analysisrather than an educational analysis.
There is no generally accepted technique for determining the educational signifi-cance of the results of an intervention. However, it could be argued that, for preser-vice primary teachers, changing negative attitudes towards science teaching so theyare more positive will have the greatest educational impact, as previous studies haveshown that negative self-efficacy directly impacts on classroom teaching (Andersenet al., 2004; Appleton & Kindt, 1999; Enochs, Scharmann, & Riggs, 1995; Harlen &Holroyd, 1997; Skamp, 1991). As a result, a methods course would make an educa-tionally significant difference if those students who had negative self-efficacy beforethe course were improved to the point where they were non-negative (i.e., neutral orpositive) by the end of the course. In the pre-test only five students (9%) had negativescores in either the PSTEB or the STOE, and in all cases these had increased toneutral or positive by the end of the course. On this basis, the course could be said tohave made an educationally significant impact.
Comparison of the interview data with the STEBI-B provided mixed results. Onone hand, the interviews supported the STEBI-B data in indicating significantchanges in self-efficacy—all of the interviewees reported strong positive changes inconfidence as a result of the course. However, there was also an important discrep-ancy. The STEBI-B results implied that very few students (9%) had negative self-efficacy before the course, but the interview data indicated that most of them (72%)had negative self-confidence before the course. Admittedly the interviewees were amuch smaller sample, so the chance of bias or error would be greater, but neverthe-less the difference was striking enough to deserve comment. One possible reason forthe discrepancy is that the interviews were carried out at a much later time (1 yearafter the methods course) so the students’ recollections of their confidence levelsprior to starting the course may have been awry due to faulty memory. The problemwith this interpretation is the significant body of research that indicates negative atti-tudes are very common among these students, which tends to give credibility to theinterview data. Another possible explanation for the discrepancy is that there mayhave been something unusual about the student group, but when the pre-test PSTEand STOE scores are compared with those from other Australian studies, theyappear to be quite similar. For example, Watters and Ginns (2000) recorded a pre-test PSTEB mean of 44.8 and a STOE mean of 35, while the corresponding results
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in this study were 43 and 34, respectively. A third possibility is that these methodol-ogies provide different measures of confidence for teaching science. For example,the term “confidence” is usually used in interviews because it is more familiar tostudents than the term “self-efficacy”, and in many studies the two terms are oftenused interchangeably (Cannon & Scharmann, 1996; Rice & Roychoudhury, 2003;Watters & Ginns, 2000). However, it is possible that confidence and self-efficacy arenot completely equivalent. A fourth possibility is that the STEBI-B may not accu-rately identify students with negative self-efficacy. In other words, the instrumentmay be useful for measuring incremental changes rather than absolute levels. Thereis some further evidence that this could be the case—in the pre-test PSTEB scale,36% of the students were more than one standard deviation above the neutral level,implying that they already had positive beliefs about their ability to teach scienceeffectively even before the course started. It would seem unusual that more thanone-third of the students would have felt confident to use science teaching strategiesbefore they had even begun their course on science teaching methods. At this stage,the answer is by no means clear, and the resolution of this issue will depend onfuture research.
Durability of the Attitude Changes
There was no significant difference between the immediate post-test and the delayedpost-test for the STEBI-B, indicating that after the 9-month delay period the meanself-efficacy levels were just as high as they had been on completion of the course.When each student’s individual scores were examined, it was found that most ofthem had not substantially changed in self-efficacy since the course ended, and thisresult was supported by the interview data. This was a welcome result because itindicated that, for most students in the methods course, their positive changes inself-efficacy had persisted until their final year of teacher education.
However, a small number of students did experience changes in their self-efficacy during the delay period. The STEBI-B results indicated that 27% of thegroup experienced either increased self-efficacy or decreased self-efficacy duringthe 9 months after the course ended. A similar pattern was noted in the interviewdata and the informal surveys. The most extreme example was one of theinterviewees who stated that her confidence had dropped from positive back tonegative. In the interviews and informal surveys, students attributed theirdecreases in confidence to the passage of time making them forget what hadhappened in the course. On the other hand, those students whose confidence hadincreased attributed it to having successfully taught science in a primary schoolduring the delay period.
In fact, having the opportunity to teach science while on practicum was a veryimportant factor for many of the students in reinforcing their confidence. This typeof situation could be interpreted as a “mastery experience” (Bandura, 1997)—whenstudents experience success in dealing with a particular situation, their self-efficacycan be enhanced. Interestingly, the students’ comments indicated that the important
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things were not only the opportunity to teach science, but also the fact that the chil-dren responded positively. For example, one student stated,
I did some science lessons in my prac and the kids all really enjoyed it. So that made memore confident because I could see how much they were enjoying it and how much theygot involved.
This suggests that in this type of mastery experience both components of self-efficacy are important to creating a feeling of success—evidence that one canperform the teaching behaviour (reinforcing the efficacy expectation) as well asevidence that the teaching behaviour will have a desirable outcome (reinforcing theresponse-outcome expectancy).
The idea of durability refers to the level of stability of a belief change in theabsence of other influential factors. In this study the practicum was an influentialfactor because it had the effect of boosting their confidence to teach science. Thehigh efficacy levels measured in the delayed post-test were therefore the result of twofactors, the course and the practicum, working together. The practicum occurredimmediately after the end of the methods course, so it was completed 8 monthsbefore the delayed post-test and 11 months before the interviews. This indicates thatthe high efficacy levels were durable for at least a period of 8–11 months.
Conclusions
This study found that preservice primary teachers’ self-efficacy was substantiallyincreased as a result of participation in a science methods course, and this was rein-forced by having the opportunity to each science in a practicum. Furthermore, thechanges in self-efficacy were not short-lived—the majority of students maintainedhigh levels of science teaching self-efficacy for 8–11 months, while they completedtheir other university courses in the absence of any further science-related studies.
These findings have two important implications for primary teacher educationprogrammes. Firstly, it appears that for most students the positive effects of a well-designed science methods course can persist until close to the end of the teachereducation programme, especially if bolstered by practicum experiences. If thescience methods course is timetabled to occur about 1 year before the end of theiruniversity studies, then one would expect that most students would be graduatingand entering their profession with reasonably high science teaching self-efficacy.Secondly, the results suggest that a practicum placement should be timed to occurfairly soon after the end of the science methods course. During this practicum,students should be allowed ample opportunities to teach science to primary chil-dren, and this should have the effect of consolidating the positive effects of the meth-ods course.
However, there were some limitations to this study that should be consideredwhen interpreting its findings. One of the problems of investigating durability is thedifficulty of accurately tracking individual students across extended periods of theirteacher education programme, a problem that has also been identified by other
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authors (Watters & Ginns, 2000). As a result, this study had a relatively smallsample size of 55 students. Perhaps future studies of durability might benefit fromselecting highly structured programmes in which most of the courses are compulsoryand students proceed from course to course as a large, single cohort.
A second issue was the apparent discrepancy between the STEBI-B data and theinterview data. In this study, it was important to identify students who had negativebeliefs, but the STEBI-B provided a different picture to that obtained by interview.The most probable reasons for the discrepancy were either that the two methodolo-gies provided different measures of confidence for teaching science, or that theSTEBI-B was not an accurate indicator of negative confidence. A further study inwhich the STEBI-B is compared with interviews carried out at the same time mayhelp to resolve the problem.
A substantial number of studies have now provided evidence that well-designedprimary science methods courses can enhance the acquisition of science teachingself-efficacy beliefs. Although these findings have been welcome, it could be arguedthat they are unsurprising—one would expect that students would feel more confi-dent to teach science after they had successfully completed a course that teachesthem how to teach science. Perhaps it is time to focus attention on the other basicprocesses of belief change. Apart from acquisition, Bandura (1997) also stated thatgenerality, durability, and resilience were important processes in belief change, yetthese remain largely unexplored.
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