Teacher Efficacy Scale

1. Abstract

The Teacher Efficacy Scale (TES), developed in its definitive operational forms by Sherry Gibson and Myron H. Dembo (1984) and refined into adapted short and extended iterations by scholars such as Anita E. Woolfolk and Wayne K. Hoy (1990), stands as one of the most foundational and widely cited self-report assessment batteries within educational psychology and teacher education. The instrument was engineered to operationalize and empirically evaluate an educator’s subjective judgment regarding their capability to exert a positive pedagogical influence on pupil academic achievement and behavior, even among children who are unmotivated, disruptive, or experiencing adverse socio-familial environments. The version detailed in this psychometric profile comprises a 22-item operationalization calibrated along a 6-point forced-choice Likert continuum ranging from 1 (“Strongly Agree”) to 6 (“Strongly Disagree”).

Extensive factor-analytic investigations of the TES historically reveal a robust, two-factor orthogonal or modestly oblique structure representing two interrelated yet theoretically distinct psychological constructs: Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE; alternatively termed Personal Efficacy) and General Teaching Efficacy (GTE; often termed Teaching Efficacy). Personal Teaching Efficacy reflects an individual educator’s personal conviction that they personally possess the pedagogical skills, instructional strategies, and motivational techniques required to facilitate meaningful student learning regardless of classroom barriers. Conversely, General Teaching Efficacy measures an educator’s broader belief system concerning the intrinsic power of education itself to overcome external environmental constraints, such as poverty, family dysfunction, and home-based lack of discipline. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate commendable internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely span between .75 and .84 across dimensions) and substantial construct, convergent, and predictive validities across novice, preservice, and career in-service educational cohorts.

2. Keywords

Teacher Efficacy Scale, personal teaching efficacy, general teaching efficacy, educational assessment, teacher beliefs, instructional behavior, classroom management, self-efficacy theory, Gibson and Dembo, Woolfolk and Hoy, teacher development, psychometrics

3. Authors

The theoretical foundations and core psychometric architecture of the Teacher Efficacy Scale were initially spearheaded by Sherry Gibson and Myron H. Dembo (University of Southern California), who published the seminal construct validation study in 1984. Subsequent adaptations and factor-refinements, specifically targeting prospective and preservice teachers’ belief systems, were advanced by prominent educational researchers Anita E. Woolfolk (now Anita Woolfolk Hoy, The Ohio State University) and Wayne K. Hoy (The Ohio State University) in 1990.

Primary Author Profiles:

• Sherry Gibson, Ph.D.: Department of Educational Psychology, School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
• Myron H. Dembo, Ph.D.: Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
• Anita Woolfolk Hoy, Ph.D.: Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology, College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. (Website: anitawoolfolkhoy.com).
• Wayne K. Hoy, Ed.D.: Professor Emeritus of Educational Administration, College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. (Website: u.osu.edu/hoy.17).

4. Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Teacher Efficacy Scale is to provide educational researchers, clinical psychologists, school administrators, and teacher preparation faculties with a reliable, empirically grounded metric for evaluating the multi-dimensional belief systems that teachers hold regarding their personal capability and the collective power of schooling. Teacher self-efficacy has been repeatedly identified as one of the few individual-level educator variables that reliably correlates with classroom instructional quality, innovative curriculum implementation, instructional resilience, and tangible student academic growth. Consequently, the TES was designed to assess these internalized beliefs systematically across both preservice teacher training contexts and active professional teaching environments.

From an applied and diagnostic standpoint, the scale serves critical functions in institutional evaluation and intervention design. For educator training programs, measuring baseline and longitudinal shifts in Personal Teaching Efficacy and General Teaching Efficacy enables researchers to evaluate whether university coursework, clinical practicums, and student-teaching experiences succeed in building instructional agency or inadvertently induce pedagogical helplessness. In in-service school improvement contexts, the scale assists educational leaders in identifying school-level climates that systematically undermine teacher agency, guiding the implementation of targeted professional development, peer coaching networks, and organizational interventions aimed at reducing teacher burnout and attrition.

From a theoretical perspective, the purpose of the TES is to resolve complex epistemological questions surrounding locus of control and human agency within instructional settings. By disentangling a teacher’s universal assumptions regarding the limitations imposed by home environments from their individualized, self-referent beliefs about personal competence, the scale enables nuanced hypothesis testing regarding how implicit belief systems govern observable pedagogical practices, such as instructional differentiation, classroom management approaches, and persistent remediation for struggling learners.

5. Psychological Construct

The Teacher Efficacy Scale operationalizes a specialized, contextual domain of human agency commonly defined as a teacher’s expectation that their efforts will result in student learning. Rather than treating teacher competence as a generic, monolithic personality trait, the construct is conceptualized as an intricate dual-faceted cognitive system comprising two distinct subscales:

Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE / Personal Efficacy)

Personal Teaching Efficacy refers to an educator’s internalized evaluation of their own individual instructional repertoire, classroom management acumen, and capacity to successfully motivate, teach, and redirect students experiencing severe cognitive or behavioral challenges. A teacher characterized by elevated PTE adopts high levels of personal accountability for pupil success and failure. When a student struggles to master a complex academic concept, a high-PTE educator attributes this impediment not to unalterable intellectual deficits within the child, but to the instructional approaches previously deployed, exhibiting confidence in their ability to locate alternative explanations, adapt difficulty levels, and redirect classroom disruptions. Items typifying this dimension include Item 6 (“When a student is having difficulty with an assignment, I am usually able to adjust it his/her level”) and Item 8 (“When I really try, I can get through to most difficult students”).

General Teaching Efficacy (GTE / Teaching Efficacy)

General Teaching Efficacy assesses an educator’s broader, normative belief regarding the fundamental capacity of teaching to overcome external, systemic barriers embedded within a child’s environment. Unlike PTE, which focuses on the self (“Can I do this?”), GTE reflects an educator’s systemic perspective on the educational enterprise (“Can teachers in general overcome the effects of poverty, unsupportive parenting, or community deprivation?”). Educators displaying diminished GTE express fatalistic beliefs regarding the limits of educational interventions, asserting that factors such as family dysfunction, generational poverty, and domestic lack of discipline are overwhelmingly decisive determinants of student achievement that eclipse classroom instruction. Representative items reflecting GTE include Item 3 (“The amount a student can learn is primarily related to family background”) and Item 10 (“Teachers are not a very powerful influence on student achievement when all factors are considered”).

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Teacher Efficacy Scale is anchored at the convergence of two foundational theoretical traditions within social and cognitive psychology: Julian Rotter‘s (1966) Social Learning Theory and Albert Bandura‘s (1977, 1986, 1997) Social Cognitive Theory.

The earliest empirical investigations into teacher efficacy originated within the RAND Corporation studies of the mid-1970s (Armor et al., 1976), which evaluated whether teachers perceived the primary locus of control over student learning to reside within their professional efforts (internal control) or within environmental, socio-familial influences (external control). While this binary locus of control paradigm provided preliminary insights, it lacked theoretical precision regarding situational agency and self-referent thought.

To establish a more robust construct validation, Gibson and Dembo (1984) explicitly fused Rotter’s locus of control construct with Bandura’s dual-component model of human agency, which bifurcates human motivation into Self-Efficacy Expectations and Outcome Expectations:

• Self-Efficacy Expectations: Bandura defined self-efficacy as a person’s belief in their capability to organize and execute the specific courses of action required to produce given attainments. In the TES framework, this corresponds directly to Personal Teaching Efficacy, evaluating whether an individual teacher judges their personal instructional skills, diagnostic capabilities, and behavioral management strategies to be adequate for teaching difficult or unmotivated students.
• Outcome Expectations: Bandura differentiated efficacy beliefs from outcome expectations, which represent an individual’s judgment of the likely consequence that performing a given behavior will produce (i.e., “If I perform behavior X, will it result in outcome Y?”). In the context of the TES, General Teaching Efficacy was conceptualized as an outcome expectation: assessing whether an educator believes that effective teaching, when executed competently, has the systemic power to yield student learning despite detrimental socio-economic and domestic constraints.

Later scholarly critiques, notably those advanced by Woolfolk and Hoy (1990) and Megan Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy, and Hoy (1998), illuminated conceptual complexities in directly mapping GTE to pure Bandurian outcome expectations. These scholars demonstrated that items measuring GTE frequently evaluate external locus of control and perceived task difficulty rather than pure outcome contingencies. Nevertheless, the integration of Bandurian cognitive self-regulation with Rotterian locus of control established the TES as the definitive classical framework that catalyzed modern teacher efficacy inquiry.

7. Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations conducted over multiple decades provide substantive empirical support for the construct, predictive, convergent, and discriminant validity of the Teacher Efficacy Scale across diverse educational contexts.

Construct and Factorial Validity

In their original validation study involving 208 elementary school teachers, Gibson and Dembo (1984) conducted exploratory factor analysis that revealed two distinct factors accounting for substantial common variance, successfully validating the conceptual independence of Personal Teaching Efficacy and General Teaching Efficacy. Confirmatory factor analyses across subsequent large-sample studies (e.g., Woolfolk & Hoy, 1990; Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993; Soodak & Podell, 1996) have continually replicated this two-dimensional structure. The factor stability remains robust even when comparing preservice teachers enrolled in clinical preparation courses to veteran career teachers operating within complex urban school environments.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The TES displays exceptionally strong predictive validity in relation to observable classroom teaching behaviors, pedagogical choices, and student outcomes:

• Classroom Organization and Instruction: Gibson and Dembo (1984) observed high-efficacy and low-efficacy teachers in classroom environments, demonstrating that teachers scoring high on Personal Teaching Efficacy allocated substantially more time to whole-class academic instruction, provided clearer task directions, monitored student work more closely, and persisted significantly longer with students who failed to answer questions correctly compared to low-efficacy peers.
• Classroom Management and Pupil Control: Woolfolk and Hoy (1990) established that teachers with lower efficacy beliefs embraced highly custodial pupil-control ideologies, relying heavily on punitive discipline, bureaucratic rules, and extrinsic constraints. In contrast, educators exhibiting elevated Personal Efficacy adopted humanistic classroom orientations, fostering student autonomy and collaborative problem-solving.
• Curricular Innovation: Longitudinal investigations indicate that educators with high personal efficacy demonstrate a pronounced willingness to adopt and implement challenging pedagogical reforms, differentiated instructional strategies, and innovative technology-enhanced curricula.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Convergent validity is substantiated by moderate-to-strong correlations between the TES subscales and theoretically congruent constructs, such as teacher job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and internal locus of control (Rotter’s I-E Scale). Discriminant validity has been corroborated through factor analyses incorporating measures of general self-esteem, social desirability, and general anxiety, verifying that the TES captures teaching-specific cognitive appraisals rather than generalized positive affectivity or socially desirable response patterns.

8. Reliability

The Teacher Efficacy Scale exhibits robust reliability metrics across diverse demographic samples, international translations, and institutional configurations.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the seminal psychometric investigation by Gibson and Dembo (1984), Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency coefficients for the extracted subscales were reported as follows:

• Personal Teaching Efficacy Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha of .78.
• General Teaching Efficacy Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha of .75.
• Total Scale: Combined internal consistency estimates across items typically range from .79 to .84.

Subsequent psychometric cross-validation investigations have yielded highly comparable reliability estimates. Woolfolk and Hoy (1990), administering the 22-item version to a cohort of 182 prospective teachers, reported internal consistency alphas of .82 for the Personal Efficacy dimension and .74 for the Teaching Efficacy dimension. Hoy and Woolfolk (1993) reported alphas of .77 and .72, respectively, across a sample of 179 practicing elementary school educators. These parameters comfortably satisfy standard psychometric thresholds (alpha > .70) for research instruments.

Test-Retest Stability

Evaluations of temporal stability demonstrate adequate stability coefficients over intermediate timeframes. Across test-retest intervals spanning 6 to 12 weeks during academic terms without intensive intervention, stability coefficients for the Personal Efficacy subscale typically range between r = .65 and r = .79, demonstrating that while efficacy beliefs represent stable cognitive self-schemas, they remain malleable to meaningful environmental input, mastery experiences, and physiological-emotional feedback.

9. Factor Analysis

The factorial structure of the Teacher Efficacy Scale has been the focus of rigorous empirical inquiry. The foundational analysis conducted by Gibson and Dembo (1984) utilized principal factor analysis with orthogonal varimax rotation on a developmental pool of 30 items administered to 208 elementary teachers. This initial extraction demonstrated that items clustered clearly into two dominant factors, ultimately leading to the retention of the psychometrically cleanest 16 items in their primary instrument, and the 22-item long-form widely deployed in subsequent empirical research.

Factor Loadings and Variance

The two extracted factors accounted for a significant percentage of total variance:

• Factor 1: Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE): This factor is defined primarily by items reflecting an internal attribution of instructional success and a teacher’s personal confidence in instructional remediation. Substantial factor loadings (ranging from .45 to .72) are exhibited by items such as Item 6 (adjusting assignments to student levels), Item 8 (getting through to difficult students), Item 11 (attributing grade improvements to effective approaches), and Item 19 (persisting with unmotivated learners).
• Factor 2: General Teaching Efficacy (GTE): This factor is defined by items capturing an educator’s assessment of environmental determinism versus instructional potency. Substantial factor loadings (ranging from .40 to .68) are exhibited by items such as Item 2 (hours in class having little influence compared to home), Item 3 (achievement primarily related to family background), Item 9 (teacher limitations driven by home environment), and Item 10 (teachers not being a powerful influence on achievement).

Structural Equation Modeling and Confirmatory Analyses

Subsequent structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) conducted by educational measurement scholars (e.g., Woolfolk & Hoy, 1990; Soodak & Podell, 1996) examined both orthogonal (uncorrelated) and oblique (correlated) factor models. While Gibson and Dembo originally posited orthogonal independence between PTE and GTE, subsequent CFA models demonstrate that an oblique two-factor model provides superior fit indices (RMSEA < .06; CFI > .90; TLI > .89), revealing a modest, statistically significant correlation (typically r = -.15 to -.30 depending on scoring directionality) between the two dimensions. This confirms that while an educator may acknowledge environmental challenges, their internal belief regarding personal competence functions as a conceptually distinguishable psychological mechanism.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Teacher Efficacy Scale (TES)
• Primary Conceptual Variants: Gibson & Dembo Long Form (22 items / 30 developmental items), 16-item short form, and Woolfolk & Hoy 22-item adapted inventory.
• Target Population: Preservice teachers, student teachers, novice educators, and career in-service elementary, middle, and high school teachers.
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or digital survey questionnaire.
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
• Total Number of Items: 22 items (in the standard operational version).
• Response Continuum: 6-point forced-choice Likert scale without an ambiguous neutral midpoint:
  • 1 = Strongly Agree
  • 2 = Moderately Agree
  • 3 = Agree slightly, more than disagree
  • 4 = Disagree slightly more than agree
  • 5 = Moderately Disagree
  • 6 = Strongly Disagree
• Item Categorization by Subscale:
  • Personal Teaching Efficacy (PTE): Items 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 19, 22.
  • General Teaching Efficacy (GTE): Items 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21.
• Scoring and Transformation Protocols:
  • Reverse Scored Items: Items 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, and 22.
  • Important Psychometric Note: Item 15 (“The influences of a student’s home experiences can be overcome by good teaching”) is the only reversed item that belongs theoretically to the General Teaching Efficacy scale; all other reversed items represent the Personal Teaching Efficacy scale.
  • Reverse transformation is calculated via the standard formula: Reversed Score = 7 - Raw Score (where a raw score of 1 becomes 6, 2 becomes 5, 3 becomes 4, 4 becomes 3, 5 becomes 2, and 6 becomes 1).
  • Following reverse coding, higher scores indicate higher levels of Personal Teaching Efficacy and higher levels of General Teaching Efficacy (i.e., strong belief that teaching can overcome environmental barriers). Researchers may compute composite sum scores or mean scale scores for each dimension.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Teacher Efficacy Scale was formally introduced to the scientific community in 1984 by Sherry Gibson and Myron H. Dembo through their publication in the Journal of Educational Psychology, with significant adaptation and normative data published in 1990 by Anita E. Woolfolk and Wayne K. Hoy. The instrument is considered an open, public-access psychometric measurement tool for scholarly, academic, and non-commercial research purposes. Dr. Anita Woolfolk Hoy maintains archival access to the instrument, its scoring keys, and related efficacy scales on her official university and personal academic repositories (anitawoolfolkhoy.com/instruments/ and u.osu.edu/hoy.17/research/instruments/).

Researchers and educational institutions are generally permitted to administer the scale without paying licensing fees or royalties, provided that proper scholarly citation and credit are granted to the original authors (Gibson & Dembo, 1984; Woolfolk & Hoy, 1990) in all resulting publications, dissertations, and conference presentations. For commercial applications, corporate software integration, or fee-based diagnostic assessment batteries, interested entities must contact the copyright holders and publishing bodies to establish formal licensing agreements.

12. 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. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.
• 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. (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
• Soodak, L. C., & Podell, D. M. (1996). Teacher efficacy: Toward the understanding of a multifaceted construct. Teaching and Teacher Education, 12(4), 401–411. https://doi.org/10.1016/0742-051X(95)00047-N
• Tschannen-Moran, M., Woolfolk Hoy, A., & Hoy, W. K. (1998). Teacher efficacy: Its meaning and measure. Review of Educational Research, 68(2), 202–248. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543068002202
• Woolfolk, A. E., & Hoy, W. K. (1990). Prospective teachers’ sense of efficacy and beliefs about control. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(1), 81–91. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.82.1.81

13. Items of the Scale