Job satisfaction among teachers: An exploration of the effects of perception of professional knowledge, instructional skills, and teacher education program quality.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In various pieces of research to date on the determination of job satisfaction of teachers with the use of perception variables, analyses of descriptive statistics and correlation were widespread. The existing theory of job satisfaction stipulates mainly on the objective dimensions of the workers and, by and large, ignores the subjective dimensions. Job satisfaction of teachers depends upon not only a few demographic variables, but rather concurrently, it also depends upon the perceptions of the teachers of their fitness, ability and confidence in teaching. There had been a lack of analyzing of job satisfaction of teachers in relation to perception of their instructional skills, professional knowledge and the quality of their preparation programs. This study has been an effort to extend the typical analytical techniques into more robust analytical methods and include the perception variables. The traditional method of hierarchical regression as well as the method of structural equation modeling, were used in this study. The National Database for Teacher Education Follow-up Studies collects data from a number of teacher preparation institutions across the United States to assess the effectiveness of various components of teacher education programs. This study based its analyses on this database.
Program quality was found strongly associated with job satisfaction in both analyses. Only the traditional method showed that instructional skills was marginally related to job satisfaction when the demographic variables and program quality were controlled. Professional knowledge was not statistically significant in either analysis. Only school level, school sector, and school setting from among the demographic variables, were found to have significant relationship with job satisfaction in both methods of analyses. The structural model, expectedly, fitted better with the data than the traditional regression model.
An alternative structural equation model, as an offshoot of the main analyses, demonstrated the existence of a strong relationship of instructional skills and professional knowledge of teachers with program quality. Inclusion of the subjective dimensions of teachers in this analysis had also been an important contribution to the extension of the existing theory of job satisfaction.