Developing an individual and collective self-efficacy scale for the teaching of writing in high schools

Abstract The study reported on here focuses on self-efficacy in relation to high-school teachers’ teaching of writing. 140 New Zealand teachers from four schools completed a teacher-of-writing self-efficacy scale (TWSES) based on a rhetorical model of the writing process and incorporating five hypothesized dimensions. An initial principal components analysis was undertaken on 25 individual self-efficacy items to investigate the dimensionality of the data and the extent to which it reflected the dimensions hypothesized. A two-component solution emerged, termed “pre-writing instructional strategies” (accounting for 52% of total variance) and “compositional strategy demonstration” (7% of variance). Further principal components analyses conducted on groups of items deemed to be thematically coherent, that loaded on each component, confirmed that the data set for each group, treated separately to any other items, was approximately uni-dimensional. Measurement scales were calibrated to each group of items, and served as the dependent variables for comparisons of teachers’ self-efficacy in different subjects. Statistically significant variations occurred in the resultant scale locations for teachers of English, the humanities, science and mathematics. The study findings have implications for the teaching of writing as conceptualized in the secondary school, and indicate a value in viewing disciplinary literacies in rhetorical terms.