Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES)

1. Abstract

The Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES), also widely recognized in educational psychology as the Ohio State Teacher Efficacy Scale (OSTES), is a preeminent psychometric instrument developed by Megan Tschannen-Moran and Anita Woolfolk Hoy in 2001. Grounded firmly in Albert Bandura‘s social cognitive theory and self-efficacy framework, the TSES was deliberately engineered to overcome the conceptual ambiguities, psychometric instability, and ceiling effects that compromised earlier measures of teacher efficacy, such as the RAND Corporation items and the Teacher Efficacy Scale (TES). The instrument exists in two validated formats: a comprehensive 24-item Long Form and a concise 12-item Short Form. Both variants utilize a fully anchored 9-point continuum ranging from 1 (Nothing) to 9 (A Great Deal), assessing an educator’s subjective judgment of their professional competence across three moderately correlated dimensions: Efficacy in Student Engagement, Efficacy in Instructional Strategies, and Efficacy in Classroom Management.

Extensive psychometric investigations have established exceptional reliability for the TSES across diverse educational sectors. In the foundational validation studies, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the total scale were reported at .94 for the Long Form and .90 for the Short Form, with individual subscale internal consistencies consistently exceeding .80 to .91 across both experienced in-service teachers and preservice cohorts. Construct validity has been corroborated through first-order and hierarchical confirmatory factor analyses, showing that while in-service teachers differentiate clearly between the three pedagogical domains, preservice candidates often exhibit a generalized, unidimensional efficacy construct. Criterion-related, convergent, and discriminant validities are evidenced by strong correlations with teacher burnout, instructional innovation, student autonomy support, classroom organizational quality, and aggregate academic achievement. As an adaptable, theoretically robust, and linguistically translated measurement tool, the TSES remains the international gold standard in educational research, teacher evaluation, and pedagogical intervention design.

2. Keywords

Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale, TSES, Ohio State Teacher Efficacy Scale, teacher self-efficacy, student engagement, instructional strategies, classroom management, psychometrics, social cognitive theory, educational assessment, factor structure, scale validation, preservice teacher beliefs, instructional quality, pedagogical competence

3. Authors

The Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale was conceptualized, developed, and validated through a collaborative scholarly partnership between two prominent educational psychologists:

• Megan Tschannen-Moran, Ph.D.
  Professor Emerita of Educational Policy, Planning, and Leadership at the School of Education, William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, United States. Dr. Tschannen-Moran is an internationally renowned scholar whose research specializes in educational leadership, organizational trust in schools, school climate, teacher efficacy, and instructional coaching.
• Anita Woolfolk Hoy, Ph.D.
  Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology at the College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States. Dr. Woolfolk Hoy is an eminent psychologist, past President of Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological Association (APA), and author of the world’s leading textbook in the field, Educational Psychology. Her pioneering research centers on teachers’ cognitive beliefs, motivation, and the psychological dynamics of classroom instruction.

Academic inquiries and licensing correspondence are facilitated through institutional repositories maintained at The Ohio State University (http://u.osu.edu/hoy.17/) and the official academic portal of Dr. Anita Woolfolk Hoy (http://anitawoolfolkhoy.com/instruments/).

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale is to provide educational researchers, clinical teacher educators, school psychologists, and academic administrators with a conceptually coherent, psychometrically rigorous, and diagnostically nuanced measurement of an educator’s self-efficacy beliefs. In cognitive and social psychological paradigms, self-efficacy does not represent an objective inventory of practical pedagogical skills, nor is it a measure of general self-esteem or broad global optimism. Rather, self-efficacy is explicitly defined as an individual’s subjective cognitive judgment of their capability to organize and execute specific courses of action required to successfully accomplish designated instructional tasks within specific contexts. Prior to the creation of the TSES, prevailing research suffered from significant measurement deficiencies, relying predominantly on general locus of control conceptualizations or two-factor instruments whose underlying psychometric properties routinely fragmented under exploratory scrutiny.

The TSES serves several critical research and practical functions within educational psychology:

• Diagnostic Assessment of Pedagogical Efficacy: It enables the fine-grained appraisal of a teacher’s perceived capacity across three distinct functional domains: motivating and engaging disaffected students, deploying flexible and higher-order instructional practices, and establishing safe, orderly classroom routines.
• Longitudinal Evaluation of Teacher Preparation Programs: Pre-service teacher education programs systematically employ the TSES to track the psychological trajectory of student teachers during practicum, field residency, and initial induction years, identifying vulnerability points where self-efficacy typically plateaus or experiences sharp declines due to “reality shock.”
• Clinical and Supervisory Remediation: Instructional coaches and school psychologists use profile elevations and depressions on the TSES subscales to tailor personalized professional development, mentoring interventions, and mastery experiences to specific pedagogical domains rather than offering generic instructional feedback.
• Predictive Modeling of Educational Outcomes: The instrument serves as a critical predictive variable in large-scale empirical studies modeling teacher burnout, emotional exhaustion, organizational commitment, retention, willingness to embrace technological or pedagogical reform, and downstream student academic motivation and standardized achievement gains.

5. Psychological Construct

The central psychological construct operationalized by the TSES is teacher self-efficacy. As established within human agency literature, teacher self-efficacy is a context-dependent, task-specific cognitive appraisal that exerts pervasive motivational effects on how teachers approach instructional design, pedagogical resilience, and relational engagement. The TSES fractionates this broad cognitive construct into three distinct yet organically interrelated subscale dimensions:

1. Efficacy in Student Engagement

This subscale assesses an educator’s subjective confidence in their ability to activate student motivation, foster emotional and cognitive investment in academic endeavors, and cultivate constructive family-school partnerships. In educational contexts, engaging students extends beyond merely capturing superficial attention; it requires the teacher to dismantle learned helplessness, stimulate intrinsic academic valuing, and promote deep, critical thinking. Items loading on this dimension evaluate perceived agency in reaching academically failing students, instilling scholastic self-belief in students with chronically low self-concepts, encouraging creative and independent thinking, and enlisting the collaboration of unengaged parents or guardians (e.g., Item 4: “How much can you do to motivate students who show low interest in school work?”; Item 22: “How much can you assist families in helping their children do well in school?”).

2. Efficacy in Instructional Strategies

The instructional strategies dimension captures a teacher’s perceived capability to execute flexible, adaptive, and cognitively challenging pedagogical methods. This domain directly aligns with contemporary theories of differentiated instruction and formative assessment. Teachers with high instructional efficacy do not merely present standardized curricular materials; they possess the cognitive flexibility to continuously gauge student comprehension in real time, generate alternative explanations or dynamic analogies when learners express confusion, craft high-level open-ended inquiry prompts, accommodate individual learning paces, and provide intellectually stimulating challenges for exceptionally gifted students (e.g., Item 10: “How much can you gauge student comprehension of what you have taught?”; Item 20: “To what extent can you provide an alternative explanation or example when students are confused?”).

3. Efficacy in Classroom Management

The classroom management dimension measures an educator’s perceived capacity to engineer, monitor, and sustain an orderly, emotionally secure, and task-oriented classroom environment conducive to learning. Far from authoritarian control or punitive discipline, contemporary classroom management efficacy concerns proactive environmental design: the systematic establishment of predictable routines, the transparent articulation of behavioral expectations, the de-escalation of disruptive or defiant outbursts, and the prevention of ripple effects wherein a single student’s dysregulation disrupts the learning trajectory of the entire peer group (e.g., Item 3: “How much can you do to control disruptive behavior in the classroom?”; Item 19: “How well can you keep a few problem students from ruining an entire lesson?”).

6. Theoretical Framework

The Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale is theoretically anchored in the intersection of Social Cognitive Theory, pioneered by Albert Bandura (1977, 1986, 1997), and the sociological tradition of locus of control initiated by Julian Rotter (1966). Early educational research by the RAND Corporation in the mid-1970s conceptualized teacher efficacy as an outcome of generalized locus of control, asking two broad questions to determine whether teachers believed student achievement was dictated by student home environment (external control) or teacher effort (internal control). While historically groundbreaking, this conceptualization conflated outcome expectancies with efficacy expectations and suffered from psychometric instability.

To overcome these theoretical limitations, Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy, and Hoy (1998) synthesized the literature into an integrated cyclical model of teacher efficacy, which provided the explicit theoretical architecture for the TSES:

Sources of Efficacy → Cognitive Processing → Analysis of Teaching Task & Assessment of Competence → Teacher Efficacy → Performance & Actions

According to this theoretical framework, efficacy judgments are formulated through the cognitive processing of four primary informational sources described by Bandura:

• Mastery Experiences: The most influential source of efficacy beliefs. Direct past successes in managing challenging behaviors or facilitating conceptual breakthroughs bolster efficacy, whereas early perceived failures undermine it.
• Vicarious Experiences: Observing credible peer role models successfully navigating pedagogical challenges allows teachers to cognitively model strategies and infer that they, too, possess the requisite capabilities.
• Social and Verbal Persuasion: Evaluative feedback, professional encouragement, and coaching from colleagues, administrators, and mentors reinforce an educator’s psychological resolve.
• Physiological and Emotional States: The somatic and affective arousal experienced during instruction (e.g., stress, anxiety, or visceral joy) serves as diagnostic data regarding one’s perceived instructional coping readiness.

Within the cyclical model, teachers cognitively weigh these informational sources while executing two simultaneous cognitive tasks: the Analysis of the Teaching Task and its Context (judging the relative difficulty, resources, student limitations, and school climate) and the Self-Assessment of Personal Teaching Competence (evaluating current knowledge, pedagogical repertoire, and emotional endurance). The interaction of these assessments culminates in domain-specific efficacy judgments, which subsequently govern teacher persistence, resilience against burnout, and instructional decision-making.

7. Validity

The construct, criterion, convergent, and discriminant validities of the TSES have been empirically established across hundreds of international peer-reviewed investigations spanning elementary, middle, high school, and university environments.

Construct and Factorial Validity

During the original development studies conducted by Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy (2001), construct validity was systematically evaluated across three sequential sample cohorts totaling hundreds of preservice and practicing teachers. Factor analysis yielded a stable three-factor solution representing Student Engagement, Instructional Strategies, and Classroom Management. Confirmatory factor analyses repeatedly confirm that this three-factor model demonstrates superior fit compared to single-factor or two-factor models for practicing teachers. For instance, structural investigations routinely achieve comparative fit index (CFI) values exceeding .92 to .95 and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) values below .06.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established by correlating the TSES with established legacy measures of teacher efficacy and related psychological constructs. The total OSTES/TSES scores correlate positively and robustly with the Rand Corporation items (r = .18 to .53, p < .01) and Gibson and Dembo’s Teacher Efficacy Scale (TES) Personal Teaching Efficacy subscale (r = .64, p < .001). Conversely, the TSES demonstrates weak or non-significant correlations with the TES General Teaching Efficacy subscale, confirming that the TSES precisely isolates personal competence expectations rather than broad societal beliefs regarding the limits of education.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

Predictive and criterion-related validities are supported by relationships with observational and organizational indicators:

• Teacher Burnout: TSES subscales exhibit substantial negative correlations with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization dimensions of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) (r ranging from -.35 to -.52), indicating that higher efficacy insulates teachers from systemic occupational stress.
• Instructional Innovation: Teachers scoring higher on the TSES display demonstrably greater openness to experimental pedagogical approaches, inquiry-based learning, and comprehensive inclusion of students with special educational needs.
• Student Achievement: Aggregated school-level teacher efficacy measured via the TSES accounts for statistically significant variance in standardized reading and mathematics achievement scores, even after controlling for student socioeconomic status (SES).

8. Reliability

The TSES exhibits exceptional psychometric reliability across its long and short forms, consistently demonstrating high internal consistency reliability, split-half metrics, and temporal stability over longitudinal research designs.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the seminal 2001 validation study by Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy, internal consistency reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha across both the 24-item Long Form and the 12-item Short Form. The observed coefficients demonstrate exceptional reliability:

Test-Retest Stability

Longitudinal investigations evaluate test-retest reliability across diverse intervals. During stable instructional periods (e.g., across 8- to 12-week intervals without direct training interventions), test-retest reliability coefficients for practicing teachers remain robust, ranging from r = .78 to r = .86, demonstrating temporal stability. Conversely, among preservice teachers undergoing intensive student teaching, scores show theoretically anticipated, dynamically sensitive fluctuations reflecting mastery feedback and ecological shifts during early field immersion.

9. Factor Analysis

The factor structure of the TSES was established through a series of iterative empirical evaluations using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across varying developmental levels of teaching experience.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the primary validation phase, an initial pool of candidate items was administered to educational practitioners. Principal Axis Factoring and Principal Component Analyses with oblique rotations (Promax and Direct Oblimin) consistently extracted three distinct factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0, accounting for approximately 54% to 58% of the total item variance. The rotated factor patterns revealed clean structural delineation:

• Factor 1: Efficacy for Instructional Strategies: Primary loadings ranged from .50 to .80, characterized by high loadings from items addressing assessment variation, responsive pedagogical adjustments, and alternative explanations.
• Factor 2: Efficacy for Classroom Management: Primary loadings ranged from .58 to .85, defined by items tapping behavioral rule enforcement, disruption management, and systematic routine establishment.
• Factor 3: Efficacy for Student Engagement: Primary loadings ranged from .48 to .76, anchored by items focusing on student motivation, family engagement, and fostering value for school tasks.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Measurement Invariance

Subsequent CFA investigations across multinational samples have substantiated the theoretical structure, though with a critical developmental nuance:

• In-Service, Experienced Teachers: A three-factor first-order intercorrelated model consistently delivers the optimal fit (e.g., CFI > .94, TLI > .93, SRMR < .05, RMSEA ≤ .058). Moderate inter-factor correlations (ranging from r = .58 to .70) demonstrate that while these competencies co-occur in professional practice, experienced teachers distinguish their capacity to manage behavior from their capacity to teach complex concepts or motivate passive learners.
• Preservice and Novice Teachers: Psychometric analyses repeatedly demonstrate that for prospective student teachers lacking extensive classroom autonomy, the TSES operates more unidimensionally. Factor analyses within preservice cohorts frequently produce a dominant general factor explaining the vast majority of variance, suggesting that novice educators conceptualize teaching efficacy as an undifferentiated, global capability. Consequently, psychometricians recommend scoring the TSES as a single composite score for preservice teachers, whereas the three subscale profiles provide superior structural validity for practicing professionals.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural, administrative, and scoring parameters of the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale are summarized below:

• Instrument Designation: Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES); also known as the Ohio State Teacher Efficacy Scale (OSTES).
• Assessment Format: Self-report Likert-type psychological inventory designed for individual or group administration via paper-and-pencil or computerized survey platforms.
• Target Population: Certified practicing teachers (elementary, middle, and secondary education), special educators, vocational instructors, and preservice teacher candidates.
• Instrument Formats:
  • Long Form: 24 items providing high diagnostic fidelity and granular subscale differentiation.
  • Short Form: 12 items (items 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, and 23 of the original item set) optimized for brief assessment or large-scale multi-scale batteries.
• Authentic Response Scale: A fully anchored 9-point continuum containing five explicit verbal benchmarks:
  • 1 = Nothing
  • 3 = Very Little
  • 5 = Some Influence
  • 7 = Quite A Bit
  • 9 = A Great Deal
  • (Points 2, 4, 6, and 8 represent unlabelled intermediate rating levels).
• Subscale Item Composition (Long Form – 24 items):
  • Efficacy in Student Engagement: Items 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 14, and 22.
  • Efficacy in Instructional Strategies: Items 7, 10, 11, 17, 18, 20, 23, and 24.
  • Efficacy in Classroom Management: Items 3, 5, 8, 13, 15, 16, 19, and 21.
• Subscale Item Composition (Short Form – 12 items):
  • Efficacy in Student Engagement: Items 2, 3, 4, and 11 (corresponds to Long Form items 4, 6, 9, and 22).
  • Efficacy in Instructional Strategies: Items 5, 9, 10, and 12 (corresponds to Long Form items 11, 18, 20, and 23).
  • Efficacy in Classroom Management: Items 1, 6, 7, and 8 (corresponds to Long Form items 3, 13, 15, and 16).
• Scoring and Computational Procedures:
  • No items are reverse-coded.
  • Subscale scores are computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of the items comprising that specific domain (yielding a subscale score from 1.0 to 9.0).
  • An overall, composite teacher self-efficacy score is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean across all 24 items (Long Form) or all 12 items (Short Form).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale was developed between 1998 and 2000 and officially published in 2001 by Dr. Megan Tschannen-Moran and Dr. Anita Woolfolk Hoy. In support of educational research and scientific advancement, the original copyright holders have made both the Long Form and Short Form of the TSES freely accessible without financial fees for non-profit academic research, university dissertation research, and educational institutional evaluations.

Researchers wishing to use the TSES do not require written permission, provided that:

1. The scale is utilized solely for non-profit educational research, clinical inquiry, or school improvement studies.
2. The original authors (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001) are properly credited and cited in all subsequent publications, theses, and public documentation.
3. The authentic wording, 9-point continuum, and directions are preserved to ensure psychometric validity.

Commercial reprinting, inclusion within fee-based diagnostic testing batteries, or distribution within commercial digital software requires formal licensing permission through Dr. Megan Tschannen-Moran (William & Mary) or Dr. Anita Woolfolk Hoy (The Ohio State University).

12. References

• 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
• Klassen, R. M., Tze, V. M., Betts, S. M., & Gordon, K. A. (2011). Teacher efficacy research 1998–2009: Signs of progress or unfulfilled promise? Educational Psychology Review, 23(1), 21–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-010-9141-8
• 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
• Tschannen-Moran, M., & Woolfolk Hoy, A. (2007). The differential antecedents of self-efficacy beliefs of novice and experienced teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23(6), 944–956. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2006.05.003
• 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
• Woolfolk, A. E., Rosoff, B., & Hoy, W. K. (1990). Teachers’ sense of efficacy and their beliefs about managing students. Teaching and Teacher Education, 6(2), 137–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/0742-051X(90)90031-Y

13. Items of the Scale