Greek teachers’ beliefs as correlated with students’ self-efficacy during a nomination procedure

Paper

This research is an effort to explore how students’ self-efficacy is correlated with teachers’ beliefs about their potential and abilities, when a nomination procedure is conducted. With an emphasis to students’ high potential and the degree that teachers nominate it, self-efficacy of a group of nominated students was compared with a group of non-nominated students. Two tools were administered: a) one questionnaire on general characteristics of students’ high potential, answered by 44 teachers voluntarily, in 15 state schools of primary and secondary education in Athens and other urban and semi-urban areas of Greece, and b) another questionnaire of 16 questions on children’s self-efficacy, answered by 647 students of 10-14 years of age. Specifically, teachers answered 21 questions, created by Gari, Kalantzi-Azizi & Mylonas (2000), for 55 selected cases of students with high potential, using a 5 point Likert scale, from 5 “absolutely agree” to 1 “absolutely disagree” regarding student’s characteristics – cognitive, learning and social- and their behavior in class. All students answered the Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale of 10 questions created by Schwarzer & Jerusalem (2013) along with 6 questions created for the purpose of this study with five questions of negative content. During the nomination procedure, 49 out of 647 students were nominated as students of high potential by 24 teachers. Cronbach’s α for the teachers’ and the students’ answers were .84 and .72, respectively; for the nominated students’ self-efficacy answers α= 77. ANOVA analyses of self-efficacy questions for the total sample of students and t-test analyses for the 48 nominated students presented statistically significant differences in terms of students’ age (10-11 years and 12-14 years) showing higher self-efficacy scores for the younger students; no significant differences emerged in terms of gender. Medium positive correlations appeared between teachers’ answers on the nominated students’ high abilities and students’ answers on self-efficacy, ranging from rho=.30 to .46. These results are discussed in terms of the moderate relation of teachers’ beliefs about their students’ abilities, despite the wide spread importance of teachers’ role to students’ understanding of abilities and the general effectiveness in school life.