An Experimental Evaluation of the Effect of Instructional Consultation Teams on Teacher Efficacy: a Multivariate, Multilevel Examination

Title of Document: AN EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF THE EFFECT OF INSTRUCTIONAL CONSULTATION TEAMS ON TEACHER EFFICACY: A MULTIVARIATE, MULTILEVEL EXAMINATION Jessica Robyn Koehler, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Directed By: Professor Gary Gottfredson Counseling and Personnel Services Teacher efficacy, the extent to which teachers feel they can influence student learning (Berman, McLaughlin, Bass, Pauly, & Zellman, 1977), has been repeatedly linked to important student and teacher outcomes (Gibson & Dembo, 1984). Although the results of many studies support the claim that teacher efficacy is an important educational construct, few studies have investigated interventions to influence these teacher beliefs. The current study evaluated whether a specific teacher intervention, Instructional Consultation Teams (IC Teams), positively affected teachers’ sense of self-efficacy as measured by two efficacy instruments. Participants included 1203 in-service elementary school teachers in 34 elementary schools within a large suburban school district—17 randomly assigned to the IC Team intervention and 17 assigned to the control condition. Because teachers are nested within schools, hierarchical linear modeling was utilized to evaluate whether scores on measures of teacher self-efficacy were influenced by IC Teams. A multivariate model was also used to evaluate the effects of IC Teams on both measures, simultaneously. The results imply that IC Teams significantly increased teachers’ scores on the efficacy scales. The current study provides one of a few attempts to evaluate the effects of a specific school intervention on teacher efficacy within an experimental framework. AN EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF THE EFFECT OF INSTRUCTIONAL CONSULTATION TEAMS ON TEACHER EFFICACY: A MULTIVARIATE, MULTILEVEL EXAMINATION by Jessica Robyn Koehler Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2009