Ashton's Efficacy Research

Teachers' sense of efficacy has primarily been assessed with two factors: sense of personal teaching efficacy and sense of teaching efficacy. The first refers to individuals' assessment of their own teacher competence; the second refers to teachers' expectations that teaching can influence student learning. In 1986, Patricia Ashton and Rodman Webb defined teacher efficacy as an educator's expectation of being able to assist student learning. They further noted that the notion of efficacy is similar to, but not identical to, other motivation constructs, such as attributions, personal causation, expectancies for success, and intrinsic motivation.

Ashton and Webb's seminal research on selfefficacy in K–12 education has found that efficacy beliefs of teachers are related to their instructional practices and to various student outcomes. Their 1986 work with seasoned teachers of students placed in classes for basic skills because of severe academic deficiencies further demonstrated that teacher efficacy was related to student achievement. They specifically found that when teachers' instructional efficacy measures were added to the regression equation predicting student achievement, an additional 24% of the variance in mathematics achievement and 46% of the variance in language achievement was explained. Teachers with a high sense of instructional efficacy tend to view difficult students as reachable and teachable and regard their learning problems as surmountable by ingenuity and extra effort. Teachers of low perceived efficacy are inclined to invoke low student ability as an explanation for why their students cannot be taught.

Reasons for these relationships are many, but research has found that teachers who have a high sense of instructional efficacy devote more classroom time to academic activities, provide students who encounter difficulties with the guidance they need to succeed, and praise their academic accomplishments. In contrast, teachers of low perceived efficacy spend more time on nonacademic pastimes, readily give up on students if they do not get quick results, and criticize them for their failures.