Teacher’s Perceived Self-Efficacy in Collaboration with Parents: The construction of a research instrument

Teacher’s perceived self-efficacy is the belief that teachers have about their own abilities and skills as educators. Teacher self-efficacy has been shown to be an important characteristic of the teacher and is strongly related to success in the teaching profession. Teachers with high self-efficacy exhibit greater enthusiasm for teaching and have greater commitment for the profession. It is claimed that high self-efficacy positively affects the collaboration of the teacher with parents. The paper describes the construction and validation of a Slovak instrument to measure self-efficacy to involve parents. Data from a sample of 150 primary school teachers In Slovakia were subjected to factor analysis. The authors decided to accept 5 factors which explain 70.6% of the overall variation. Correlations between dimensions of the questionnaire ranged from 0.29 to 0.55. The reliability alpha of the dimensions is from 0.886 to 0.905. Scores in dimensions reflect the perceived easiness of the task for the teacher. The highest score was in Ability of the Teacher to Inform Parents about Pupil’s progress, the lowest score was in the dimension Ability of the Teacher to Persuade Parents to Support the School.
PaedDr. Jana Majerčíková, PhD., Comenius University in Bratislava, Faculty of Education, Institute of Educational Studies, Račianska 59, 813 34 Bratislava, Slovak Republic; e-mail: majercikova@fedu.uniba.sk
Prof. PhDr. Peter Gavora, CSc., Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Faculty of Humanities, Research Centre, Mostní 5139, 760 01 Zlín, Czech republic; e-mail: gavora@fhs.utb.cz