Teacher Efficacy Scale (Short Form)

Abstract

The Teacher Efficacy Scale (Short Form) (TES-SF) is a widely cited, 10-item psychometric instrument designed to evaluate educators' belief systems regarding their capacity to influence student learning, academic achievement, and behavioral engagement. Originating from the foundational 30-item instrument developed by Gibson and Dembo (1984) and subsequently refined into a concise, psychometrically robust two-factor model by Hoy and Woolfolk (1990, 1993), the scale operationalizes two distinct dimensions: Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE) and General Teaching Efficacy (GTE). PTE assesses a teacher's individualized confidence in their pedagogical skills and motivational capacity to instruct even the most unmotivated or difficult students, whereas GTE reflects an educator's broader belief regarding the power of teaching relative to structural and familial constraints, such as socioeconomic disadvantage and home environment.

The TES-SF utilizes a 6-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Agree) to 6 (Strongly Disagree), featuring an equal distribution of items across both subscales. Empirical investigations demonstrate acceptable to strong internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach's alpha coefficients typically ranging from .72 to .82 for PTE and .68 to .74 for GTE. Factor analytic studies consistently validate its stable, orthogonal or moderately oblique two-dimensional structure. Over three decades of educational and organizational research, the TES-SF has served as a benchmark measurement tool, demonstrating robust construct, convergent, and predictive validity in relation to teacher burnout, classroom management styles, student motivation, instructional innovation, and school organizational health.

Keywords

Teacher Efficacy Scale, Personal Teaching Efficacy, General Teaching Efficacy, Teacher Self-Efficacy, Educational Measurement, Psychometrics, Gibson and Dembo, Hoy and Woolfolk, Classroom Management, Teacher Socialization, Organizational Climate

Authors

The Teacher Efficacy Scale (Short Form) was developed and validated through the collaborative psychometric research of:

• Wayne K. Hoy, Ed.D. — Professor Emeritus of Educational Administration, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
• Anita Woolfolk Hoy, Ph.D. — Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

The instrument directly adapts and refines the seminal parent instrument formulated by Sherri Gibson and Myron H. Dembo (1984) at the University of Southern California. Inquiries regarding research permissions and archival materials are maintained through the official academic repositories of The Ohio State University and Anita Woolfolk Hoy's research portal.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Teacher Efficacy Scale (Short Form) is to provide educational researchers, clinical psychologists, school psychologists, and academic administrators with a brief, theoretically grounded instrument to measure teachers' perceived instructional self-efficacy. Beliefs about personal competence are instrumental in determining how teachers approach classroom instruction, student discipline, differentiated learning, and institutional crises. A major psychometric challenge in educational psychology during the late 1980s was the length, factor instability, and administrative burden associated with longer diagnostic batteries. By distilling Gibson and Dembo's original 30-item scale into a focused 10-item instrument, Hoy and Woolfolk established an efficient diagnostic tool that preserves essential psychometric properties while minimizing respondent fatigue.

In research contexts, the TES-SF is extensively utilized to evaluate teacher preparation programs, institutional socialization, and organizational climate. Longitudinal research relies on the scale to observe how prospective educators transition from preservice student teaching to in-service practice, illuminating the systematic shifts that occur in personal versus general efficacy. In professional development and school psychology, the scale serves as an actionable screening tool to detect teacher vulnerability to emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and instructional surrender. Educators exhibiting low personal efficacy can be identified for targeted mentorship, pedagogical coaching, and stress-reduction interventions. Furthermore, the tool provides administrators with diagnostic data to analyze how leadership styles, collegial support, and school organizational health correlate with teachers' collective and individual confidence.

Psychological Construct

The Teacher Efficacy Scale (Short Form) evaluates teacher efficacy through two theoretically divergent yet interrelated psychological dimensions: Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE) and General Teaching Efficacy (GTE).

1. Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE)

Personal Teaching Efficacy refers to a teacher's personalized belief in their own pedagogical capabilities, instructional skills, and individual resilience to foster student learning, irrespective of external obstacles. This subscale comprises Items 3, 6, 7, 8, and 9. It reflects an internalized assessment of personal agency. For example, Item 3 ("When I really try, I can get through to most difficult students") and Item 7 ("If a student in my class becomes disruptive and noisy, I feel assured that I know some techniques to redirect him/her quickly") evaluate behavioral control, instructional flexibility, and emotional assurance in managing unpredictable classroom dynamics. Teachers exhibiting elevated PTE scores view learning breakdowns as problems that can be solved through modified instructional strategies, diagnostic sensitivity (Item 8), and persistent effort (Item 9). This dimension is associated with academic persistence, innovative teaching methods, and student-centered classroom management.

2. General Teaching Efficacy (GTE)

General Teaching Efficacy—also conceptualized in educational literature as Teaching Efficacy (TE)—reflects an educator's broad belief concerning the power of teaching as an institution to overcome systemic, biological, and environmental barriers. Comprising Items 1, 2, 4, 5, and 10, GTE taps into an external locus of control or generalized outcome expectancy. Items such as Item 1 ("The amount a student can learn is primarily related to family background") and Item 10 ("When it comes right down to it, a teacher really can't do much because most of a student's motivation and performance depends on his or her home environment") measure the degree to which an educator views environmental influences, parental neglect, or socioeconomic deficits as insurmountable barriers to academic intervention. Low scores on GTE (reflecting agreement with deterministic statements) characterize an attitude of educational fatalism, whereas high GTE scores reflect an optimistic perspective that high-quality instruction can transcend home deficits.

Theoretical Framework

The structural framework of the TES-SF is anchored at the intersection of two major psychological traditions: Julian Rotter's Locus of Control Theory and Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory.

The earliest operationalization of teacher efficacy originated within the RAND Corporation evaluations of federally funded educational innovations (Armor et al., 1976). Drawing upon Rotter's (1966) social learning framework, RAND researchers introduced two benchmark items that assessed whether teachers believed learning outcomes were primarily determined by external forces (external locus of control) or by their own efforts (internal locus of control). The sum of these two items generated the original "teacher efficacy" index, which demonstrated remarkable predictive power over student reading achievement and program success.

Building on these findings, Gibson and Dembo (1984) reconceptualized the construct through the lens of Bandura's (1977) social cognitive theory, which delineates two conceptually distinct cognitive constructs: self-efficacy expectations (an individual's conviction that they can successfully execute the behavior required to produce the outcomes) and outcome expectancies (a person's estimate that a given behavior will lead to certain outcomes). Gibson and Dembo aligned Personal Teaching Efficacy with Bandura's self-efficacy expectations, postulating that PTE reflects the teacher's appraisal of their own teaching capability. Conversely, they mapped General Teaching Efficacy onto Bandura's outcome expectancy, arguing that GTE represents the broader belief that student learning can be influenced by effective teaching despite adverse environments.

Hoy and Woolfolk (1990, 1993) critically refined this framework. They noted that many items in the original Gibson and Dembo scale suffered from ambiguous factor loadings, and argued that GTE does not cleanly represent Bandura's outcome expectancy. Rather, GTE reflects an external locus of control or systemic belief regarding structural barriers, whereas PTE cleanly represents personal instructional self-efficacy. By removing psychometrically unstable items, Hoy and Woolfolk isolated a robust two-factor structure that directly captures the dialectical tension between an educator's personal competence and external environmental fatalism.

Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Teacher Efficacy Scale (Short Form) have been established across diverse empirical studies:

• Construct Validity: Hoy and Woolfolk (1993) examined the construct validity of the 10-item TES-SF among a sample of 179 elementary school teachers across 37 schools. Confirmatory and exploratory evaluations demonstrated clear convergence into two distinct subscales: PTE and GTE. The two dimensions demonstrated discriminant construct validities by displaying divergent relationships with organizational health variables. PTE was significantly predicted by a school's institutional health, specifically associating positively with the principal's influence ($r = .27, p < .01$) and academic press ($r = .31, p < .01$), whereas GTE correlated with the level of institutional integrity ($r = .29, p < .01$).
• Predictive Validity: The TES-SF demonstrates robust predictive utility regarding instructional behaviors and teacher well-being. Hoy and Woolfolk (1990) demonstrated that preservice teachers undergoing organizational socialization experienced significant shifts in both subscales; while PTE increased substantially through student teaching experience, GTE declined as prospective teachers encountered the practical realities of public school classrooms. In subsequent studies, higher PTE scores predicted greater persistence with struggling students, a preference for humanistic rather than custodial classroom management strategies, and increased willingness to implement innovative curricula.
• Convergent and Discriminant Validity: Research evaluating convergent validity shows that PTE correlates negatively with teacher burnout dimensions, specifically emotional exhaustion and depersonalization on the Maslach Burnout Inventory ($r = -.36$ to $-.44$), while exhibiting strong positive correlations with professional accomplishment ($r = .48$). Discriminant validity has been demonstrated against social desirability and generalized self-esteem measures, confirming that the TES-SF captures domain-specific educational beliefs rather than generalized positive self-regard.

Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the 10-item TES-SF has demonstrated acceptable to high levels of internal consistency and temporal stability across diverse instructional settings:

• Internal Consistency: In their foundational study, Hoy and Woolfolk (1993) reported Cronbach's alpha coefficients of .77 for the 5-item Personal Teaching Efficacy subscale and .72 for the 5-item General Teaching Efficacy subscale. In an earlier investigation involving student teachers, Hoy and Woolfolk (1990) established an alpha coefficient of .82 for the personal efficacy dimension. Subsequent replications across elementary and secondary school contexts have yielded comparable estimates, with PTE alphas consistently ranging between .74 and .84, and GTE alphas ranging between .68 and .76.
• Split-Half and Temporal Stability: Test-retest reliability evaluations over intervals ranging from 6 to 12 weeks have yielded stability coefficients between $r = .71$ and $r = .79$ for Personal Teaching Efficacy, demonstrating that personal efficacy represents a stable cognitive belief system. GTE exhibits slightly greater temporal variability ($r = .62$ to $.69$), reflecting its susceptibility to external institutional policy shifts and school-level climate fluctuations.

Factor Analysis

The factor structure of the Teacher Efficacy Scale (Short Form) was established through rigorous exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Gibson and Dembo's (1984) original 30-item instrument had been criticized by psychometricians for cross-loading items, unstable secondary factors, and low communalities. Hoy and Woolfolk resolved these structural ambiguities by extracting the highest-loading, cleanest items representing the two foundational factors.

Exploratory factor analysis (principal components analysis followed by orthogonal Varimax and oblique Promax rotations) of the 10 items consistently demonstrates a two-factor solution accounting for approximately 46% to 54% of the total variance:

• Factor 1: Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE) accounts for the largest proportion of common variance (~28% to 32%). Items 3, 6, 7, 8, and 9 load heavily on this factor, with primary factor loadings typically ranging from .58 to .79, and negligible cross-loadings (< .20) on Factor 2. For instance, Item 9 ("If I really try hard, I can get through to even the most difficult or unmotivated students") and Item 3 ("When I really try, I can get through to most difficult students") routinely manifest loadings exceeding .70.
• Factor 2: General Teaching Efficacy (GTE) accounts for roughly 18% to 22% of the variance. Items 1, 2, 4, 5, and 10 load strongly on this factor, with factor loadings ranging from .52 to .74. Item 10 ("When it comes right down to it, a teacher really can't do much because most of a student's motivation and performance depends on his or her home environment") typically manifests the highest loading on this dimension.

Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) have affirmed that a two-factor correlated model provides a superior fit to the data compared to a unidimensional model, demonstrating acceptable fit indices ($\chi^2 / df < 2.5$, RMSEA $le .06$, CFI $ge .93$, TLI $ge .91$).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Self-report psychometric questionnaire; domain-specific teacher self-efficacy inventory.
• Target Population: In-service elementary, middle, and high school teachers, as well as preservice student teachers.
• Number of Items: 10 items.
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE): 5 items (Items 3, 6, 7, 8, 9).
  • General Teaching Efficacy (GTE / TE): 5 items (Items 1, 2, 4, 5, 10).
• Response Scale: 6-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Agree
  • 2 = Moderately Agree
  • 3 = Agree slightly more than disagree
  • 4 = Disagree slightly more than agree
  • 5 = Moderately Disagree
  • 6 = Strongly Disagree
• Scoring and Transformation Rules:
  • Reverse Scored Items: Items 3, 6, 7, 8, and 9 must be reverse scored prior to subscale computation ($1 \rightarrow 6, 2 \rightarrow 5, 3 \rightarrow 4, 4 \rightarrow 3, 5 \rightarrow 2, 6 \rightarrow 1$) when higher scores are operationalized to represent higher personal efficacy.
  • Subscale Mean Calculation: Compute separate mean scores for Personal Teaching Efficacy (mean of reverse-scored items 3, 6, 7, 8, 9) and General Teaching Efficacy (mean of items 1, 2, 4, 5, 10). Alternatively, researchers who wish to represent high GTE as high teaching efficacy rather than environmental determinism reverse score items 1, 2, 4, 5, and 10 as well. Researchers must clearly specify their scoring directionality in empirical reports.
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Teacher Efficacy Scale (Short Form) was developed through research published in 1990 (Hoy & Woolfolk) and further validated in 1993. The authors—Wayne K. Hoy and Anita Woolfolk Hoy—have placed this instrument in the academic public domain for non-commercial educational and psychological research purposes. No fee or formal royalty payment is required to use the scale in non-commercial university research, theses, dissertations, or school-level assessments.

The instrument, along with its conceptual scoring manual, is openly accessible through the official academic repositories maintained by the authors at Anita Woolfolk Hoy's Research Instruments and Wayne K. Hoy's Educational Research Archive at The Ohio State University. Researchers utilizing the instrument must appropriately cite the primary source publications in their academic works.

References

• Armor, D., Conry-Oseguera, P., Cox, M., King, N., McDonnell, L., Pascal, A., Pauly, E., & Zellman, G. (1976). Analysis of the school preferred reading program in selected Los Angeles minority schools (Report No. R-2007-LAUSD). The RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R2007.html
• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman and Company.
• Gibson, S., & Dembo, M. H. (1984). Teacher efficacy: A construct validation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(4), 569–582. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.76.4.569
• Hoy, W. K., & Woolfolk, A. E. (1990). Organizational socialization of student teachers. American Educational Research Journal, 27(2), 279–300. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312027002279
• Hoy, W. K., & Woolfolk, A. E. (1993). Teachers' sense of efficacy and the organizational health of schools. The Elementary School Journal, 93(4), 355–372. https://doi.org/10.1086/461729
• Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976
• Tschannen-Moran, M., & Woolfolk Hoy, A. (2001). Teacher efficacy: Capturing an elusive construct. Teaching and Teacher Education, 17(7), 783–805. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0742-051X(01)00036-1

Items of the Scale