Self-efficacy for inquiry-based instruction: surviving the leap from student-teacher to an inquiry-oriented novice teacher
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Inquiry-based teaching and learning are rooted in social constructivism and focus on the different roles that students and teachers adopt compared to those adopted in traditional settings. Challenges associated with implementing inquiry as a pedagogical approach have often been associated with teachers’ motivation, especially their self-efficacy, to their previous research experience, as well as to teacher-education programs that expose future teachers to learning about and teaching using an inquiry approach. Induction into the teaching profession, therefore, is a critical period of time for novice teachers’ self-efficacy for implementing inquiry as a pedagogical approach. This longitudinal study examined senior preservice teachers’ self-efficacy for inquiry instruction and followed a sample of six new teachers during their first year of professional practice. We began by administering a survey to 244 senior preservice teachers to determine if self-efficacy for inquiry enactment differed between elementary and secondary preservice teachers and in what ways. Whereas they differed in their self-efficacy regarding engaging students in problem finding, differences were less evident in inquiry tasks describing linking knowledge. We also conducted focus groups to determine what elements from teacher-education and field experiences might explain their understanding of inquiry instruction. These interviews revealed that preservice teachers were learning more of what seemed to be a procedural introduction to inquiry. In the second phase of this study, we followed six first-year teachers as they struggled to implement inquiry in their classrooms. At the end of the first year, we administered the same survey as in phase 1 to monitor changes, if any, in self-efficacy during the transition from student-teacher to novice teacher. We conducted individual interviews at the beginning and at the end of the academic year to examine for changes in participants’ responses regarding their conceptualizations of inquiry and challenges they identified as obstacles to implementing inquiry. To triangulate our data, we also observed the six teachers in their classrooms five times over the course of one year. We used these data sources to explore first-year teachers’ alignment among self-efficacy, conceptualizations, and actual enactment of inquiry. At the end of the first year of professional practice, self-efficacy for teaching using inquiry underwent a general decline as well as the number of concepts teachers used to describe inquiry enactment during the interviews. The number of observed inquiry tasks increased and most progress was observed in tasks describing student engagement and question asking and the least in linking knowledge. Strong alignment was observed between changes in self-efficacy and enactment of inquiry as well as changes between self-efficacy and conceptualizations of inquiry enactment. Implications for teacher-education and research about self-efficacy are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".