Abstract:
Abstract
Teachers’ efficacy for teaching their perceptions about their own capabilities to foster students’ learning and engagement has proved to be an important teacher characteristic often correlated with positive student and teacher outcomes. The central concerns of this study were to evaluate the level of teachers’ efficacy and to examine the mean difference between high and low efficacious teachers’ in terms of uses of instructional strategies and student engagement. Twenty teachers and two hundred students from five departments were selected using lottery method sampling techniques. Teachers’ sense of efficacy scale, finding instructional strategies scale and student course engagement scale were used as data collection instrument. One sample t-test and two samples t-test were employed for data analysis. One sample t-test revealed that the sample mean was significantly different to test value. This indicated that the Woldia College of Teachers’ Education teachers had low teacher’s efficacy. The two samples t- test result indicated that there were statistically significant difference between teachers with high teachers’ efficacy and low teachers’ efficacy in their uses of instructional strategies(p=0.04) and student engagement(p=0.03). In conclusion, since teachers' sense of efficacy is related to students’ motivation, it is important to determine how teachers uses various instructional strategies to engage students in the classroom. The present study may help involving students as a variable in the study of teachers’ efficacy gave a better understanding of the direct contribution of teachers’ efficacy on students’ engagement. It was recommended that teachers need to develop their efficacy by focusing their internal capability and beliefs by considering the importance of their belief in their uses of instructional strategies and level of student engagement. Also, studies in relation to teachers’ efficacy should use various instruments to involve students as a variable and to observe the consistency of the measurement.
Keywords: teachers’ efficacy, instructional strategies, student engagement.