Teacher efficacy of Turkish Physical Education teachers

The main purpose of this study is to determine the validity and reliability of the Teacher Efficacy Scale in Physical Education (TESPE) in Turkey's conditions, and to test if there are any differences in gender and teaching experience of Turkish PE teachers. Turkish version of the scale was administered to 257 physical education teachers (184 males and 73 females) from three cities in Turkey. Exploratory factor analysis showed that the scale consists of four dimensions similar to the original Cronbach's alpha .89, while both Equal-Length Spearman Brown split-half coefficient (r=.74) and Guttman's split-half coefficient (r=.74) showed a good result. The independent t-test results revealed that there were no significant gender differences in TESPE subscales. Teaching experience is not statistically significant on PE teachers’ efficacy. These results indicated that the TESPE is a valid and reliable scale for Turkish culture.


INTRODUCTION
In recent years there has been a growing body of research on teacher efficacy as an important factor underlying teaching and learning.Teacher efficacy is concerned primarily with having a positive effect on students' learning (Ashton, 1985).Research suggests that teacher efficacy may underlie critical instructional decisions including the use of time, classroom management strategies and questioning techniques (Gibson and Dembo, 1984;Saklofske et al., 1988;Woolfolk et al., 1990;Tschannen-Moran, 2000;Hand, 2013).
Teacher efficacy has also been shown to be a strong predictor of commitment to teaching (Coladarci, 1992), adoption of innovations (Midgley et al., 1989) and higher levels of planning and organization (Allinder, 1994).
Highly self-confident teachers are more committed to their profession (Coladarci, 1992), display more persistence in the face of failure, and spend more time on teaching than do teachers with low self-confidence (Gibson and Dembo, 1984).Important antecedents of teacher efficacy have included teacher training and experience (Hoy and Woolfolk, 1993;Ramey-Gassert et al., 1996), the academic ability of one's students (Smylie, 1988), and school and community support (Fuller et al., 1982;Hoy and Woolfolk, 1993;Park, 1992;Ramey-Gassert et al., 1996).
Teacher efficacy is the teacher's belief in his or her capability to organize and execute courses of action required to successfully accomplish a specific teaching task in a particular context (Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998).Teachers with a higher sense of efficacy are less critical of students when they make mistakes (Ashton and Webb, 1986) and exhibit more enthusiasm about teaching (Allinder, 1994).Highly efficacious teacher are more likely to use student-centered learning strategies, while teachers with low efficacy tend to use teachercentered strategies (Tschannen-Moran and Hoy, 2001;Kaufman and Sawyer, 2004).Higher teacher efficacy is also associated with higher students' achievement (Moore and Esselman, 1992;Ross, 1992;Watson, 1991), higher sense of learning efficacy in students (Anderson et al., 1988), and more positive student attitude toward school and teachers (Woolfolk et al., 1990).Thus, the importance of teacher efficacy is well established.
One characteristic of investigations of teacher efficacy is that virtually all researchers conceptualize the construct in terms of fostering student academic achievement only.Teaching efficacy is a predictor of variables such as student motivation (Herman et al., 2000) teaching commitment (Darling-Hammond et al., 2002;Johnson and Birkeland, 2003).Researchers have reported that teachers with high efficacy are more likely to get involved in teaching, satisfaction with the profession, producing greater effort and motivation for teaching, taking on extra roles in school (Goddard et al., 2000;Wheatley, 2005).
Although teacher efficacy phenomenon is generally concerned with the students in classroom, the physical education lessons have been made outside of the classroom.Physical education is a subject matter domain in which students are expected to learn knowledge and skills in sports and physical activities (Allision et al., 2000).Given that physical education is education about movement, education through movement, and education in movement (Arnold, 1979), learning in physical education individuals is often accomplished by mastering a physical movement through physical training.Therefore, the present study is focused on the physical education teachers' efficacy.
In view of definition of the research area, the initial purpose of the research was to validate and evaluate the reliability and factorial validity of the Teacher Efficacy Scale in Physical Education (TESPE) for the Turkish population.The TESPE was designed to measure the nature of the PE teacher efficacy by Chase and Lirgg (1999).Chase and Lirgg (1999) suggested a conceptual framework for their study on the PE teacher efficacy.Their concept of teacher efficacy comprises four dimensions: a) motivation (a teacher's confidence in his/her ability to motivate students); b) analysis of skills (the teacher's ability to analyze students' performance in skills); c) preparation (the teacher's ability to prepare and plan for instruction); d) communication (the teacher's ability to communicate information to his/her students).They hypothesized that teacher efficacy will affect a Gencay 1355 teacher's commitment to teach, persistence in teaching, use of time in providing instruction, and the quality and type of feedback provided to students.These outcomes are important variables in preparing physical education students.
It was hypothesized that the model of teacher efficacy in physical education developed by Chase and Lirgg (1999) would be a valid model that probably contains four sources: motivation, analysis of skills, preparation, and communication in Turkish samples.
Therefore, the objective of the study is to validate the Teacher Efficacy in Physical Education Scale (TESPE) in the Turkish context in the area of physical education and to discover the effects of gender and teaching experience.Thus, the study addressed the following questions: Is there a significant difference between physical education teachers' gender and their teaching efficacy?Is there a significant difference between the experienced and inexperienced teachers' teaching efficacy?

METHOD Translation
The English version of the TESPE items was translated into Turkish, followed by a back translation procedure widely described in the literature (Hambleton and Kanjee, 1995).Initially, translation from English to Turkish was done separately by three bilingual researchers.Thereafter, translation discrepancies between the three translated forms were discussed in order to develop an initial Turkish version of the scale.A second bilingual translator whose native language was English and, who had not seen the original English version of the TESPE translated this initial Turkish version of the scale from Turkish back to English.The back-translated versions were then compared to the original English version and any inconsistencies, errors, biases and incongruences were highlighted.
Prior to carrying out this research, a pilot study with 7 physical educators was designed to control possible semantic instrument concerns.As an additional check, the translated instruments were independently reviewed by the jurors to confirm whether each item served the purpose of the instrument (Brislin, 1980).It was emphasized to the physical education teachers on how to fill the questionnaire and not to leave any item unanswered on the questionnaire.The approximate time necessary to complete the instrument was 15 min.Incomplete or badly answered questionnaires were rejected.

Participants and settings
Participants consisted of 257 physical education teachers (184 males and 73 females) who were randomly selected from middle and high schools in the three cities (Kahramanmaras, Mersin and, Osmaniye) in Turkey.After the determination of schools, permission was requested and granted from the Ministry of Education to conduct the study in these schools.The questionnaires were applied to physical education teachers in the school settings by the researcher.These were 96 early career teachers (5 years' experience or less), 67 mid-career teachers (6-10 years'

Instrument
Teacher Efficacy Scale in Physical Education (TESPE).The TESPE was developed by Chase and Lirgg (1999) to measure the teacher efficacy in physical education and originally included four subscales and 16 items; motivation (α = .77),analyze (α = .79),preparation (α = .78)and communication (α = .79)subscale.When answering each of the questions, physical education teachers were first asked to indicate their level of agreement on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (not at all true of me) through 5 (very true of me), adapted from the 7-point Likert type scale used in the originally TESPE.
Socio-demographic variables.In addition, a series of sociodemographic variables were included in the questionnaire: sex, age and, teaching experience.

Statistical analysis
The TESPE items' descriptive statistics (means, standard deviations, skewness and kurtosis) are shown in Table 1.KMO (Kaiser-Mayer-Olkin) and Barlett tests were conducted.Principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation was used to analyze instrument structure, followed by a reliability analysis.To examine the internal consistency and reliability of the TESPE, Cronbach's alpha and Spearman-Brown split-half coefficient analysis was accomplished.The Guttman's split-half technique for reliability of the instrument was also calculated.Many statisticians (Cronbach, 1951;DeVellis, 1991;Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994) conclude that the internal consistency is acceptable if a Cronbach alpha value is greater than .70.This guideline was employed in this study.Independent samples t-tests were used to compare differences in gender and, one-way ANOVAs with post hoc test used to compare difference in teaching experience (independent variable) and subscales of the TESPE (dependent variables).The statistical analysis was conducted by SPSS 15 for Windows.

Psychometric Properties of the Turkish version of the TESPE
Exploratory factor analysis.KMO of sampling adequacy test result was .86 and Barlett's test of sphericity was significant (χ2 = 2182.67,df = 120, p < 0.001).These results exposed that the sample size was adequate and has shown sphericity.A principal components analysis  followed by rotation using the varimax criterion was conducted on the 16 TESPE items to replicate the fourfactor structure reported by Chase et al. (2003).The 0.4 cut-off point was used for excluding items not permitting reasonable interpretation (Tabachnick and Fidell, 2000) in any factor.Together, the four factors explained 70.52% of the variance (Table 2).Cronbach's alpha coefficient was .89.The Guttman's split-half coefficient procedure resulted in a good reliability coefficient (r= .74).Likewise the Equal-Length Spearman Brown split-half coefficient showed a good correlation (r= .74).These good reliability coefficients infer that the test halves are highly correlated and the questionnaire has good internal consistency (Table 3).The results from principal components and reliability analyses strongly indicated that four factors for the TESPE model were appropriate.Pearson correlation analyses.To test the extent to which the responses on the TESPE were entered into a Pearson's product moment correlation analysis along with the TESPE subscale scores.There was a significant positive correlation in the subscale of the TESPE (r = .34to .47;p < .05)(Table 4).Gender differences.Gender differences in the TESPE subscales tested by independent samples t-test.The test results indicated that there was no statistically significant difference between gender and motivation (t(2, 255) = .42,p = .66),analysis (t(2, 255) = .466,p = .64),preparation (t(2, 255) = .686,p = .49)and, communication factor (t(2, 255) = 1.022, p = .3).

DISCUSSION
The objective of the study is to validate the Teacher Efficacy in Physical Education Scale (TESPE) in the Turkish context and to discover the effects of gender and teaching experience.The second purpose of this study was to analyze gender and teaching experience differences in TESPE in Turkish physical education teachers.
It was hypothesized that the model of teacher efficacy in physical education developed by Chase and Lirgg (1999) would be a valid model that possibly contains four sources: motivation, analysis of skills, preparation, and communication in Turkish samples.The results suggested that the physical education teachers' efficacy scale is a valid and reliable instrument that could be used in the studies in Turkey.Based on the research conducted by Chase et al. (2003), the study supported Turkish version of the TESPE replication of four factor structure and reliability.
We compared gender differences and it was not found any significant difference in gender (p>.05).Further, comparisons of physical educators teaching experience, the teachers in late career had higher the preparation factor for their teaching efficacy than lower experienced teachers (p< .05).Also, there was statistically significant correlation with one another in the subscale of the TESPE (r =.34 to.47; p<.05).
Results of the current study showed that gender does not affect physical educators' teaching efficacy.In a study relating with Teaching Efficacy among College Student Teachers, Syed et al. (2011) found no significant difference in teaching efficacy between male and female student-teachers.The results also suggest an agreement with previous studies by Cakiroglu (2005), Main and Hammond (2008) as well as Tejeda-Delgado (2009).
However, test results showed that the Teacher Efficacy Scale in Physical Education (TESPE) has good validity and reliability in Turkey's conditions.It can be used for measuring Turkish physical education teachers' teaching efficacy.Research on teaching efficacy specific to physical education is conspicuously lacking.Among the recent teaching efficacy research in physical education, Martin et al. (Martin et al., 2001;Martin and Kulinna, 2003) found that teachers with higher efficacy had stronger intentions, more favorable attitudes, and greater feelings of control.Teachers' sense of efficacy appears to affect basic beliefs about students and instruction and choices of instructional methods and also influences their students' beliefs about their capabilities and learning (Humphries et al., 2012).
It also demonstrates the importance of developing measures of teacher efficacy that closely matches with the nature and scope of teachers' perceptions about their professional responsibility, which may vary in different contexts (Ho and Hau, 2004).Thus, the availability of a teaching efficacy instrument specific to physical education area can be a significant contribution.
In summary, these findings suggest that teaching efficacy of physical educators differed with teaching experience, but there was no significant difference between genders.

Limitations and Future Directions
This study is limited in several areas.One limitation of the present study is that the sample comprised only limited samples of Turkish physical education teachers.Thus, generalizing the findings beyond the sample should be done with caution.However, more research needs to examine teaching efficacy of physical educators.Followup research should be completed in order to determine whether this study's results could be generalized to a more diverse teachers' body.

Conclusion
Based on the current findings, it would be confident to say that the TESPE can produce reliable and valid scores when used to assess physical education teachers' teaching efficacy in Turkey.Teachers who were efficacious in their ability to teach active lessons with limited space were also confident that they could motivate students who did not enjoy PE.Future research should continue in examining other forms of psychometric properties of the TESPE with larger and more diverse samples.In addition, research on Physical education teachers' teaching efficacy can make great contributions to the literature.

Table 1 .
Descriptive statistics of Physical Education Teachers' Physical activity Self-Efficacy Scale.

Table 2 .
Factor Loadings for Physical Education Teachers' Physical activity self-efficacy scale.
Note.Principal components factor analysis with varimax rotation performed.