Is Self-Efficacy a Key Factor for Effective Teacher Educators?

Abstract

Globally, there is an overwhelming concern over the quality and relevance of education. Education being the social system of society, plays a key role in reforming and reconstructing the society from time to time. Teacher Education Programme plays an important role in shaping and moulding the habits, manners and above all, the character of pupil-teachers to become effective teachers. Teacher educators have the responsibility to prepare teachers having all these qualities. So, there is a need of special education and training for the preparation of such teacher educators. An important factor which can determine professional effectiveness of teacher educators is self-efficacy. It means teacher educators must also have some sense of belief that they can make a difference to the lives of children they are teaching and that those children are learning. In this context the study started with the question, is there any difference in professional effectiveness of teacher educators with reference to occupational self-efficacy? For this, a sample of 300 teacher educators from government and private institutions were identified. Professional Effectiveness Scale prepared by the researcher and Occupational Self- Efficacy Scale (OSES) developed by Pethe, Chaudhari and Dhar were used as tools in this study. F-test was used to examine whether the difference found in mean scores is significant or not. Significant differences in professional effectiveness were found between the teacher educators having average and low occupational self-efficacy and the teacher educators having high and low job value at 0.01 level of significance. However, no significant difference in professional effectiveness was found between the teacher educators having high and average occupational self- efficacy .