Abstract:

Over the past twenty years, in the great majority of Western countries, new responsibilities have been assigned to teachers as a result of education policies based on school autonomy and decentralisation. As a consequence, increasing attention has been placed on teachers’ changing professional role, including their formal level of accountability (Euridyce, 2008). However, little is known about teachers’ perceived personal responsibility in the context of their broadened professional roles, its psychological determinants and correlates.
Recent research has begun to focus on the link between teachers’ sense of their own responsibility, causal attributions and on their behavioural, motivational and emotional correlates (Lauermann & Karabenick, 2011; Matteucci, 2008; Matteucci & Gosling, 2004). The present study was designed to examine the relations between contextual and personal variables that are conceptually linked to responsibility, including: school climate, self-efficacy beliefs, implicit theories of intelligence and motivations for having chosen teaching as a career. We hypothesized that school climate and teachers’ personal beliefs may shape their sense of professional responsibility.

Participants were 268 high-schools teachers (mean age= 50.1 DS=7.3, range: 27-64; men=37.3% ) who completed a questionnaire including the following scales: FIT-Choice Scale (Watt & Richardson, 2007); Mastery and Performance instructional practice scale and Teacher self-efficacy scale (Midgley et al., 1997); Teacher Responsibility Scale (Lauermann, & Karabenick, in press); Revised-School-Level Environment Questionnaire (Johnson, et al., 2007); Theories of Intelligence scale (Dweck, 2000); Burnout and Work engagement scales (Schaufeli, et al., 1996, 2006).

To identify the antecedents of teachers’ responsibility, the variables concerning the self-efficacy, the school climate and the theories of intelligence were entered into a linear stepwise regression model to determine their relationship with the teachers’ responsibility for negative outcomes. In the stepwise model only 3 variables were retained. Model 1: self-efficacy; Model 2: self-efficacy and increment theory of intelligence; Model 3: self-efficacy, increment theory of intelligence, and school positive climate concerning the relationships with students. Self-efficacy was the strongest predictor accounting for a variance of 9 % (adjusted r2=0.091). This increased to 13% (adjusted r2=0.126) when beliefs about intelligence as an incremental characteristic and the perception of a school climate characterized by positive relationships with students were included in the model. At all steps these predictors were significant (p=.05). These three variables had significantly positive regression weights indicating that participants with higher scores were more likely to have higher score of perceived responsibility for negative outcomes. The analysis of data is ongoing, and further results will be forthcoming.

From a theoretical perspective, the study contributes to a better understanding of conditions that are likely to shape teachers’ personal sense of responsibility, corroborates previous findings with U.S. teachers (Lauermann & Karabenick, 2011) and, importantly, expands upon prior research, as it examines the relations between responsibility and such important constructs as school climate and implicit theories about intelligence. Implications for practice will be discussed.

Keywords:

Teacher responsibility, self-efficacy, school climate, implicit beliefs, theories of intelligence.