Age, experience, gender, and teacher efficacy in the EFL context of Iran

Teacher efficacy is a context and culture-specific construct which has been rarely investigated in ELT contexts like Iran. The current study explored the two types of teacher efficacy (individual and collective teacher efficacy) among Iranian English language instructors. Moreover, this study was an attempt to discover whether age, gender, and experience can significantly influence perceptions of collective teacher efficacy and teacher self-efficacy. Data were collected from 130 English language instructors through Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy's (2001) Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) and Goddard's (2002) Collective Teacher Efficacy Scale questionnaires. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) illustrated no significant difference between the English instructors' collective teacher efficacy and teacher self-efficacy and their respective subscales. Furthermore, the results indicated no meaningful differences in perception among teachers with different age, experience, and gender levels across all the subscales of collective teacher efficacy or teacher self-efficacy. We conclude that efficacy beliefs seem to be resistant to change once established and may not change significantly with age, experience and gender.

Keywords:

Teacher-efficacy , Self-efficacy , EFL , Collective teacher efficacy