Defending my Thesis

Author: Crystal Schaefer | Major: Elementary Education | Semester: Spring 2024

My name is Crystal Schaefer, a (now former) student of the College of Education and Health Professions here at the University of Arkansas. I majored in Elementary Education, and I was fortunate to get to work on this honors research project with my mentor, Dr. Ralston, of the Curriculum and Instruction department. I began my research process in Spring 2022 and defended my project in the Spring of 2024, which was also the semester during which I received SURF funding. Now that I’ve graduated, I plan to work as a K-6 teacher somewhere in the Northwest Arkansas area.

In Spring of 2022, when I began searching for a research topic, the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on education was still looming large. COVID-19’s effect on education was also something of particular interest to me because I got to witness it firsthand, since I finished my K-12 career virtually and experienced my first year as an undergraduate completely online. With this interest in mind, I knew that I wanted to conduct research in an area that could have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now that I had a possible idea for my research topic, I began to seek out a thesis mentor. I discussed my topic with several of my professors in the College of Education and Health Professions, all of whom recommended Dr. Christine Ralston. When first meeting with Dr. Ralston she expressed interest in my topic because she felt that it was relevant and interesting. However, Dr. Ralston’s first piece of advice for me was to begin to narrow down my topic and make my research aims feasible. Dr. Ralston continued to give me guidance like this all throughout my research process and truly gave me guidance in an area where I often felt clueless.

As I continued to narrow down my research topic I also began my practicum teaching experience as a Junior. During this time in the Fall of 2022 and the Spring of 2023 I got to talk with classroom teachers, many of whom kept expressing that they felt discouraged or baffled by the recent changes in education and in their student population (which manifested in major hits to their teacher self-efficacy). These conversations were incredibly insightful, and they helped me eventually narrow down from the overwhelming research question “what was COVID-19’s impact on education?” to “How do teachers in one rural Arkansas school district feel about their own performance, self-efficacy, and future in the field of education?”

The purpose of my research study was to investigate teachers’ self-efficacy in certain scenarios with the hope of better understanding how teachers can feel more empowered in their profession in the future. In my study, teacher self-efficacy refers to a teacher’s “capabilities to bring about desired outcomes of student engagement and learning, even among those students who may be difficult or unmotivated” (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001, p. 783). Data was collected with a web-based survey distributed to the two participating elementary schools via email. Additional qualitative data was collected through focus group interviews that were conducted in person and recorded. The 24-question Qualtrics survey was distributed through email for kindergarten through second grade teachers between two elementary schools in one rural Arkansas school district. These 24 questions were adapted from The Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). The survey collected 16 total responses.

The survey results provided evidence that teacher efficacy in instructional strategies is the participants’ greatest strength, with the items that measure efficacy in instructional strategies evoking the highest mean scores. One area of varying self-efficacy lies in classroom management, which contained both the highest and lowest reported mean scores from the participating teachers.

Both the quantitative and qualitative data collected aided in revealing the theme of two types of classroom management. As previously mentioned, the items on the survey that measured teacher self-efficacy in classroom management garnered both the lowest and highest responses on the whole survey. This blatant discrepancy let me know that classroom management was multi-faceted. When looking at the survey responses further, I found that the types of classroom management questions that garnered the lowest responses were those asking about responding to student behaviors, while the questions that garnered the highest responses were questions asking teachers about managing aspects of the classroom such as routines.

To understand these categories of classroom management better I did some research and found a 2016 study with similar findings that named these two categories “classroom behavior management” and “classroom instructional management” (Martin et al., 2016, p.35). With this quantitative theme now identified, the next step was to gather my qualitative data in the hopes of explaining why these teachers felt low self-efficacy in classroom behavior management but high self-efficacy in classroom instructional management.

I conducted two separate focus group interviews, one for each elementary school, during which participating teachers were asked to elaborate on their survey responses and the general quantitative data collected. Through coding, a theme was discovered that participating teachers felt that classroom instructional management was proactive, while classroom behavior management was reactive by nature. The teachers shared with me that it’s much easier to be proactive rather than reactive. The teachers also shared that they feel they have experienced a recent hit to their self-efficacy in managing classroom behaviors because they believe student misbehavior has increased. Through additional coding multiple patterns and themes were revealed about the teachers’ thoughts regarding why this increase in adverse behavior has happened, including changes in students’ home environments, technology’s increased presence in students’ lives, COVID-19’s effect on social interactions, and a general decrease in students’ ability to self-regulate their emotions.

My research has opened up opportunities for future research to be done in this area, specifically research surrounding teachers’ ability to self-regulate and manage all of their responsibilities. This was qualitative data I collected but could not be identified as a theme because teachers at only one of the schools mentioned this. I believe my research could also encourage others to do their own research on teacher self-efficacy, perhaps with a larger sample size. I am not sure I will conduct future research on this topic, but I am interested in working with Dr. Ralston to present my findings at educational research conferences in 2024 and 2025.

This experience not only gave me research knowledge, which will be very valuable if I do decide to go back and get a master’s degree or a doctorate, but also gave me more insight into my future profession. I now understand that teachers of all experience levels experience low self-efficacy at times, which will be important for me to remember as I embark on my first year as a novice teacher. Despite the fact that many themes were revealed about student misbehaviors increasing and teacher self-efficacy decreasing, this research study gave me hope because it showed me that teachers are eager to adapt to this new challenge and (hopefully) meet this challenge head-on with a renewed, higher sense of self-efficacy in the future (which is what I think teaching is all about).