Measuring the self-efficacy of mentor teachers.

Abstract

This study tested the validity and reliability of the Mentoring Self-Efficacy Instrument (MSEI). The instrument was developed to measure mentor teachers' self-efficacy with the roles and responsibilities of mentoring. The results indicate that the MSEI is only effective in measuring one aspect of mentor teachers' self-efficacy: feedback. These findings also suggest that mentor teachers may not have a clear definition of their role asa mentor and highlights the need to create a common understanding of what it means to be a mentor teacher.

Introduction

Self-efficacy is defined asa person's context-specific assessment of competence (Bandura, 1977). As such, a person's self-efficacy can impact the effort a person puts forth in a given situation, how long the person persists on a given task, and how they feel about the task (Goddard, Hoy, & Woolfolk-Hoy, 2004). To date there are multiple teacher self-efficacy scales (Ashton, Buhr, & Crocker, 1984; Brouwers & Tomic, 2001; Friedman & Kass, 2002; Gibson & Dembo, 1984; Riggs & Enochs, 1990). With these self-efficacy scales, researchers have then been able to examine the impact of teacher self-efficacy on variables such as: student achievement and motivation (Moore & Esselman, 1992; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk-Hoy, 2001), school effectiveness (Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993), and success of program implementation (Guskey, 1988). The research on teacher self-efficacy suggests that efficacy may have a powerful impact on many of the aspects of teaching and/or children's school performance.

With this in mind, one must also consider the impact of self-efficacy on teachers' other responsibilities that extend beyond teaching children. For example, classroom teachers often serve as mentors to novice teachers during their university field experiences and/or during their first years of teaching. As Hawkey (1998) has argued, "Mentors need to feel self-confident in their own agency as teacher educators" (p. 668). Because of the significant influence of field experiences in teacher development and university teacher education programs' heavy reliance on classroom teachers, it is important to identify the essential characteristics for mentoring success--including teachers' mentoring self-efficacy. Better understanding of teachers' self-efficacy as mentors of other teachers holds promise for shedding light on improving teacher preparation through strengthening the quality and effectiveness of mentoring. We should note that while Riggs (1997) describes the use of a mentoring self-efficacy scale that she created, validation of that instrument has not occurred.

Like other teacher self-efficacy instruments, we created the Mentoring Self-Efficacy Instrument (MSEI) based on our understanding of the "breadth of the 'mentors' role" (Friedman & Kass, 2002, p. 675--italics added). The conceptualizations of a mentor's roles and responsibilities may be debated. Indeed, in some respects, mentoring, like teaching, appears to be idiosyncratic, reflecting personal strengths, interests, and beliefs about how teachers develop (Martin, 1997). A mentor's interpersonal skills are often thought to be the most critical element of effective mentoring (Brooks, 1996). While extremely important, relationship building is not the exclusive activity of mentors. Other critical activities come into play: providing support and critical feedback, maintaining high performance standards, and advocating for novice teachers with administration are arguably part of what an effective mentor does (Fairbanks, Freedman, & Kahn, 2000). Furthermore, while teachers who are asked to mentor novice teachers tend to transfer what they know about teaching into their mentoring (Orland-Barak, 2005) they must take on new and varied roles and responsibilities in addition to those in which they engage as teachers. Items on the MSEI addressed the following aspects of mentoring: general mentoring relationships, classroom teaching practices, quality feedback, mediation, impact, and school organization. The purpose of the current study was to develop the MSEI by establishing internal validity and reliability.

Method

The Mentoring Self-Efficacy Instrument was developed to measure mentors' self efficacy regarding six aspects of mentoring; general mentoring relationship, classroom teaching practices, quality feedback, mediation, impact on mentee, and school organization. Each component was viewed to be distinct and critical to quality mentoring. After developing the individual items, feedback was solicited from mentors who did not participate in the study. This feedback was used to ensure that the items were appropriate, clear, and captured the major aspects of mentoring. After receiving the initial feedback we made changes to several items, dropped items and then asked another and different set of mentors to provide feedback on the revised instrument before sending it out for the study. The Mentoring Self-Efficacy Instrument was sent to 674 teachers who had served as mentors affiliated with a teacher education program in the Western United States. Mentors were recruited through local school districts and the University's Office of Field Services. The following criteria were used to identify mentors:</p> <pre> Mentors are classroom-based teachers who are working with preservice teachers during heir culminating teacher education field experience (either semester-long student teaching or year-long internship). Mentors who work with preservice teachers during practica experience prior to student teaching or internship are not eligible. Mentors based at the university (i.e., university supervisors) are not eligible to answer the survey. Prior experience as a mentor is not required. </pre> <p>Two-hundred and sixty-four mentors (39%) returned the survey. All of the mentors work with preservice teachers from one of three programs; early childhood education (41 mentors), elementary education (111 mentors), and secondary education (112 mentors). The mentors also had a range of teaching and mentoring experience.

An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to examine the dimensionality and subscale structure of the 35 items. Principal components analysis was used as the method of extraction and Kaiser's eigenvalue-greater-than-1.0 criterion was used as the stopping rule to determine the number of factors extracted. The Promax procedure was used as the method of rotation. The SPSS reliability procedure was then used to compute item-to-adjusted-total correlation coefficients and to compute Cronbach's alpha coefficient as an estimate of internal consistency reliability.

Results

Although the Mentoring Self-Efficacy Instrument was designed to have six factors (general mentoring relationship, classroom teaching practices, quality feedback, mediation, impact, and school organization), the results of the exploratory factor analysis revealed the presence of one dominant factor that accounted for 38% of the total variance and included only six of the 35 items. Five other factors were extracted. Each of them accounted for only three to five percent of the variance. None of the six items that loaded on Factor 1 had a high loading on any other factor. The items that loaded on the feedback factor included the following:

* I struggle to have open lines of communication with the novice teachers that I mentor. (.683)

* I find it difficult to provide appropriate feedback when conferencing with novice teachers. (.561)

* I believe I am not very effective in pointing out a novice teacher's weaknesses (.549)

* I believe I am not a very good advocate for novice teachers when dealing with administrators, other teachers, and/or university personnel (.515)

* When a novice teacher has difficulty implementing a management plan, I will usually be at a loss as to how to help them implement a plan. (.409)

* The professional inadequacies of a novice teacher cannot be overcome by the mentoring I provide. (.403)

Each of these six items had a factor loading exceeding .40 and from a content perspective each represented a component of feedback. Item 4 is the only item that may not be, at first glance, closely related to feedback, although this notion of advocacy may be seen as a means of conveying the novice teachers' strengths and weaknesses to others. These six items were then submitted to a follow-up factor analysis to check for unidimensionality. Principal components analysis was again used as the method of extraction, and the eigenvalue-greater-than-1.0 criterion was again used as the stopping rule. The results showed that there was only one factor with an eigenvalue greater than 1.0 and that this single factor accounted for 39% of the variance among the six items.

The reliability procedure in SPSS was then used to examine the internal consistency of the six items that loaded on Factor 1. The resulting estimate of Cronbach's alpha coefficient was .79. Five other factors were identified in the original factor analysis, although the total variance accounted for by each was only between 3%-5%. Furthermore, these five factors did not represent clear content domains and had several items that also loaded onto other factors. Because these factors accounted for so little of the variance, did not represent clear content domains, and had several double loadings, we determined that these factors were too ambiguous and could not be considered factors of the Mentoring Self-Efficacy Instrument.

Discussion

The results of the factor analysis for the MSEI suggest that the current instrument does not measure mentor teachers' feelings of self-efficacy related to a variety of mentoring responsibilities (i.e., classroom practice, mediation, impact, etc.). Rather, it is a measure of a mentor's self-efficacy related to only one of these aspects of mentoring: feedback. While these findings are somewhat surprising, they do emphasize a more fundamental and far-reaching problem related to mentoring self-efficacy: There appears to be no clear, shared understanding of the responsibilities held by mentor teachers or the activities involved in the act of mentoring prospective and early career teachers. How, then, can one maintain self-efficacy for a role that does not have a universally understood definition?

A closer look at the current MSEI highlights these ambiguities. For example, one of the items on the instrument ("I believe I have the ability to counsel a novice teacher out of the profession.") was particularly troublesome to a large number of the teacher mentors. This notion of advising preservice teachers to think about the appropriateness of teaching for them as a profession is at the heart of the kind of critical feedback necessary to mentoring prospective teachers. Indeed, one could argue that critical feedback is, perhaps, one of the most essential aspects of meaningful mentoring. However, this item did not load with the feedback factor and multiple respondents made side comments about not understanding this item (i.e., I'm not sure what you are asking, Don't understand the question, What does this mean?, Unclear, What profession? Why would I want to?). As a result, one may conclude, as argued by Young and her colleagues (2005), that mentor teachers conceptualize their role strictly as a supportive one, rather than a critical or evaluative one (see also Cameron-Jones & O'Hara, 1997). Mentor teachers, then, see themselves providing feedback only in response to the expressed needs of the preservice teacher, not evaluating or judging professional competency. This is particularly disconcerting considering the responsibility university-based teacher education programs place on mentor teachers to critically evaluate mentees and offer a judgment that is used to recommend licensure. Based on this expectation, it is likely that many teacher education programs assume that in addition to providing support when requested by the novice teacher, mentor teachers would also help intending and early career teachers critically examine their teaching practices and challenge their existing beliefs about teaching and learning.

In addition to the absence of a shared definition of mentoring (or, perhaps, largely because of it) the MSEI also needs to be refined and adjusted to address three limitations. First and foremost, only six of the 35 items loaded on a clear factor. This suggests that the instrument, as a whole, is not very effective in measuring the efficacy of mentor teachers. Perhaps the reason why there was only one factor with so few items is directly related to the ambiguities highlighted above. Second, all of the six items that are part of this factor were reverse coded items, suggesting that these items were operating differently than those items written positively. In addition to substantiating the argument that negatively coded items function in a very different way from positively coded items, we cannot assume that the negatively coded items on the MSEI would all load on the same factor if they were written as positive statements. This suggests that even the single dominant factor described in the results of this study should be interpreted with caution. Finally, the scale used for each item in the MSEI ranged from 1-4 (strongly disagree to strongly agree) and frequency distributions indicated that the respondents tended to only use the higher end of the scale (3-4). This may suggest that the scale needed to be expanded, although many current self-efficacy scales often only range from 1-5 (Enochs, Smith, & Huinker, 2000; Riggs, 1988; Riggs & Enochs, 1990).

Conclusions

Universities in partnership with the public schools have the responsibility and charge to prepare novice teachers. Indeed, this partnership acknowledges the significant role mentor teachers play as they work with novice teachers and provide opportunities for growth and practice in classroom settings (Fairbanks, Freedman, & Kahn, 2000). Furthermore, just as many educators use teacher self-efficacy instruments to understand teacher preparation and development, impact on student achievement, and overall teacher effectiveness, a mentoring self-efficacy instrument will be invaluable in the selection and preparation of mentor teachers, understanding the development of mentor teachers, and gauging the overall impact of mentors on the preparation of novice teachers. However, the critical role and responsibilities of mentor teachers are perhaps still misunderstood, or understood in multiple ways and sometimes conflicting (Hawkey, 1997). These mis- or multiple understandings hinder the development of a mentoring self-efficacy instrument. Therefore, before a useful instrument can be created, university-based educators and teacher mentors must come to a common understanding of what it means to be a mentor teacher (e.g., whether the mentoring relationship is primarily that of support or that of inquiry [sec Young, et al, 2005]). This common understanding will allow educators to consider the conditions necessary to create and sustain mentoring relationships and will aid in the preparation and development of teacher mentors--activities that can be facilitated by the use of a mentoring self-efficacy instrument.

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Kendra M. Hall, Brigham Young University

Leigh K. Smith, Brigham Young University

Roni Jo Draper, Brigham Young University

Robert V. Bullough. Jr., Brigham Young University

Richard Sudweeks, Brigham Young University

Hall PhD, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education; Smith, PhD, Assistant Professor of Science Education; Draper, PhD, Associate Professor of Literacy (Department of Teacher Education); Bullough, PhD, Professor, Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling(CITES); Sudweeks, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Instructional Technology and Psychology