Date of Award

Summer 8-2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

First Advisor

Megan Cosier

Second Advisor

Margaret Sauceda Curwen

Third Advisor

Kelly Kennedy

Fourth Advisor

Nicol Howard

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to better understand the relationship between novice teachers’ context-specific self-efficacies and stresses and whether these constructs differed from the self-efficacies and stresses of experienced teachers in middle school and early high school. Novice teachers, or teachers in their first 5 years of teaching, are most susceptible to attrition and turnover, which research indicated is sometimes brought on by stress. Research also showed self-efficacy consistently had a negative correlation to stress. This study used the second-hand dataset obtained from the Teaching and Learning International Survey, focusing on 2560 responses obtained from teachers in the United States from 220 public and private schools during the 2018 school year. The findings indicated several differences between novice teachers and their experienced coworkers. The findings indicated workplace well-being and stress—a unique stress construct—was significantly correlated with almost all context-specific efficacies: (a) classroom management, (b) instruction, and (c) student engagement. Although the self-efficacy and stress findings were consistent with the literature, other findings varied among novice and experienced teachers and provided insight into other nuances such as gender and the subject matter taught. These nuances call on future researchers to examine these subgroups of teachers more thoroughly. A limitation of this study was its cross-sectional data which limited the ability to draw inferences between novice teachers and their more experienced peers.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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