Strategies for Enhancing Teachers’ Beliefs in Their Effectiveness: Research on a School Improvement Hypothesis

Teachers’ beliefs in their effectiveness consistently predict desired student outcomes. This article argues that the achievement impact of Teacher Efficacy (TE) arises from goal-setting and attributional processes. Teachers who anticipate that they will be successful set more challenging goals for themselves and their students, accept responsibility for the outcomes of instruction, and persist through obstacles. These findings suggest that student achievement of cognitive and affective goals can be enhanced by strengthening TE. The hypothesis that school improvement will flow from enhanced TE has been tested in a variety of skill-development projects with mixed results. It is pro -posed that skill-development approaches be augmented by attending to teacher beliefs (particularly about the mutability of intelligence) and to conditions of teacher work.