SCIENCE TEACHING SELF-EFFICACY AND SCIENCE CONTENT COURSES: ASSESSING THE ROLE OF FIELD EXPERIENCE

Self-efficacy (SE) is the belief in one’s ability to complete a given task – such as teaching science. The Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument (STEBI) assessed SE from an earth and space science content course for elementary education majors that covers topics from geology, meteorology, & astronomy. In previous findings, students left the course with significantly higher levels of SE, but gains were not influenced by demographic variables such as high school size or parent’s education but university year did yield significant differences with freshmen yielding larger gains than seniors.

These conclusions were based off of samples collected in courses dominated by freshmen and sophomores. A recent state-mandated change in course requirements led to an upsurge in juniors and seniors registering for the course. These students yielded similar results as their younger peers except for university year where all groups produced similar sized gains in SE rather than larger gains by freshmen. When matched with position within their teacher education program, most students yielded similar positive normalized gains in SE, but students who were completing their first field experience the same semester they took this course yielded negative normalized gains, possibly because a few students had adverse reactions to the realities of the classroom.

This study investigated another potential influence on SE. The Self Theory of Intelligence (ST) classifies people who believe that intelligence is a fixed entity versus those who believe it can grow incrementally. Contrary to the literature and prior expectations, a majority of the students exhibited an incremental view, and when used as a categorical variable, students with both views yielded similar levels of SE, suggesting that this variable does not strongly influence SE towards teaching science.

More research is needed on this topic including adapting the ST instrument to focus on science intelligence rather than intelligence in general. In addition, universities rely on a variety of settings to provide Earth science instruction for Elementary Education majors. A comparison between different university settings may yield insights into best practices towards teaching Earth science to this critical subpopulation.