On February 13, 2022, Dr. Oyugi Millicent shared her dissertation findings focused on personal and contextual factors predicting agriscience teaching self-efficacy at the Southern Region Conference of the American Association for Agricultural Education (S-AAAE). Drawing from social cognitive theory, she utilized Binomial Logistic Regression to determine the log odds of observing high or low agriscience teaching self-efficacy from mentorship, job satisfaction, burnout, gender, teaching experience, and school context.
Her presentation explained that burnout and job dissatisfaction negatively influenced agriscience teachers’ self-efficacy, causing a premature exodus from the profession. She mentioned that the exit portends danger to the future of agricultural education at secondary and university levels. Thus, research on self-efficacy beliefs should help prepare high efficacy teachers who exhibit professional longevity.
The study’s findings indicated gender had a significant but negative effect on the log odds of teachers having high teaching self-efficacy. In contrast, personal accomplishment, job satisfaction, and teaching experience contributed significantly and positively to the log odds of teachers having high teaching self-efficacy. As a result, she recommended that school administrators address male teachers’ low self-efficacy and implement strategies to boost teachers’ job satisfaction and sense of personal accomplishment. Additionally, she suggested that future research should employ statistical techniques, such as psychophysiological tools, to ascertain realistic levels of teachers’ self-efficacy and gain a more comprehensive picture of how the studied factors influenced teachers’ self-efficacy.
S-AAAE was held in conjunction with the Southern Association of Agricultural Scientists annual meeting. To learn about additional Lamm Lab presentations held at this convergence of conferences, see our post on the Southern Rural Sociological Association Conference, Southern Region Meeting of the American Society for Horticultural Sciences, and the National Agricultural Communications Symposium.
