Some Determinants of Upper Secondary School Teachers’ Self-Efficacy for Teaching in Socio-Culturally Diverse Classrooms

Saša Puzić, PhD, Josip Šabić, PhD and Iris Marušić, PhD are the authors of the paper “Some Determinants of Upper Secondary School Teachers’ Self-Efficacy for Teaching in Socio-Culturally Diverse Classrooms” published in the journal “Sociology and Space”, 61 (2).

This paper examines individual and contextual determinants of upper secondary school teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching in socio-culturally diverse classrooms. In doing so, this specific aspect of teachers’ self-efficacy is related to diversity awareness and openness to experience (individual aspect), as well as teachers’ assessment of school climate, and share of pupils of minority nationalities (contextual aspect). The following research problems were formulated: 1) to examine the relations of teachers’ diversity awareness and openness to experience with self-efficacy for teaching in socio-culturally diverse classrooms; 2) to explore the relations of teachers’ assessment of school climate, and share of minority pupils in school with self-efficacy for teaching in socio-culturally diverse classrooms; and 3) to examine possible moderation effects of teachers’ assessment of school climate, and share of minority pupils on the relation between self-efficacy for teaching in socio-culturally diverse classrooms from one side, and diversity awareness and openness to experience from the other side. The data were collected by an online questionnaire on 268 teachers from 20 upper secondary schools in the northern part of Croatia. They were analysed by multiple hierarchical regression analysis. The findings indicate that diversity awareness, openness to experience, positive school climate, and higher share of minority pupils are positively correlated with teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching in socio-culturally diverse classrooms. Moderation effects were not statistically significant, which points to the conclusion that the relations of diversity awareness and openness to experience with teachers’ self-efficacy do not depend on the analysed determinants of the school context.

The paper is available at the link.