An Investigation of the Relationship between Professional Development and Teacher Efficacy

Abstract

Teaching is regarded as a stressful and challenging job. This paper, based on Guskey’s professional development models and Bandura’s social cognitive theory, adopts close-ended survey questions to collect numeric data, investigates the association between teachers’ perceived effectiveness of professional activities and teacher self-efficacy, and finds that teaching experience level (notice vs. career) moderates the association between teachers’ perceptions of the effectiveness of PD and their level of self-efficacy, aiming at furthering understanding of the current state of primary school teachers regarding their PD effectiveness and efficacy.