유아교사 효능감 개념 및 관련 변인 고찰 = A Study on Concept of Early Childhood Education Teacher Efficacy

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Enhancing quality of education has been a major issue in the field of Early Childhood Education in recent years. Many studies concerned on enhancing the educational quality emphasized the imperativeness of teacher efficacy. This study is to find out the constructing valuables of teacher efficacy and to conceptualize teacher efficacy for teachers working with young children by reviewing recent studies on teacher efficacy. Teacher efficacy refers to teacher`s beliefs that factors under their control ultimately have greater impact on the results of teaching than do factors in the environment or in the student-factors beyond the influence of teachers. The concept of teacher efficacy comes from two different studies on human behaviors; one from the concept of locus of control studied by Rotter, and the other from the concept of self efficacy described by Bandura. Many scholars have been making their effort to apply the concept into practice. Their major concerns have been in developing appropriate tools to assess and in finding the valuables involving the concept of teacher efficacy. In this study, teacher efficacy embeds two concepts; personal teaching efficacy and general teaching efficacy. Most studies on these concepts have been reported that teacher efficacy had positive relations with students` cognitive and affective achievement and with teaching ability of teachers. However, they also found that the concept of teacher efficacy was not a static concept influencing students` achievement and teachers` ability in any situation. It was rather a dynamic one changing the relations depend on students, situations and subjects. Thus, it implicated that the further studies on teacher efficacy should considers various valuables related to the concept of teacher efficacy. Moreover, most studies on this matter employed elementary school children rather than young children. Therefore, regarding these two issues, reconstructing the concept of teacher efficacy for teachers with young children might be necessary, children`s developmental level, teachers` role and responsibility in implementing curriculum and coherence of relationships with colleagues and administrators in teachers` work place were considered as important valuables related to teacher self efficacy of teachers working with young children through reviewing early studies.