Determining self-efficacy levels of the English language teachers for the education of gifted students

Abstract

Gifted student education has been the centre of many studies to this day. Even though there was an amount of studies examining gifted education there was limited amount of studies related to self-efficacy levels of English Language Teachers for gifted students. Therefore the aim of this study is to determine the self-efficiency levels of English Language Teachers towards gifted student education and to examine teachers’ age, pofessional seniority levels and gender variables. This study was carried out with 352 volunteer English Language Teachers (291 women, 61 men) who worked in the 2020-2021 academic year in the Educational Institutions related to the Ministry of National Education in Turkey. As a result, it was found that self-efficiency beliefs of English Language Teachers towards education of gifted students in both sub-dimensions and total scores of the scale were around 80 out of 100. Therefore it was revealed that teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs were high. Also, the results of the analysis showed that self-efficiency beliefs of English Language Teachers towards the education of gifted students increased with the age variable. In addition to these results, it was found that the self-efficacy beliefs of English Language Teachers increased as their teaching Professional seniority levels increased. Lastly, there was no significant difference in the whole scale and its sub-dimensions related to gender variable. In addition to that, literature review of the studies about teachers’ professional seniority and gender variables revealed that, a consensus could not be reached. In order to eliminate this ambiguity, further studies are needed on this subject. On the other hand analysis of the scale revealed that self-efficacy scores of English teachers in subjects such as behavior control, implementation of the Individual Education Program and classroom control were lower than the other items.

Keywords

• Gifted Education
• English Language Teaching
• Self-efficiency
• Teacher self-efficacy for gifted education
• Self-efficacy scale for education of gifted students

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