Measuring Teaching Efficacy: An Intensive Experience with New Faculty in a Remote Nursing Program in Northern India

This presentation will describe an intensive workshop developed by American educators from Drexel University to increase the teaching self efficacy of a young and inexperienced faculty in a school of nursing in a remote university located in the Himalayas in Northern India.   Teaching efficacy has been found to be predictive of the faculty's ability to implement a curriculum and may underlie critical components of the teacher role, such as decisions about instruction, class management, and referral of problem students (Soodak and Podell, 1996). This construct goes beyond effectiveness to include the notion that efficacy is a trait that enables teachers to control the learning environment, affect student performance and produce desired goals or outcomes (Ashton, 1984; Guskey & Passaro, 1994). The content included in this four day workshop included teaching-learning styles, writing objectives to increase higher level thinking, curriculum development, evaluation methodologies in both classroom and clinical arenas, and  teaching strategies such as concept mapping, questioning, and case studies. Prior to and after these sessions, the faculty completed the Teaching Self Efficacy Scale (Nugent, Bradshaw, & Kito, N. 1999).  Although overall pre-post score differences on the Teaching Efficacy scale did not reach significance, certain instrument items showed significant increases(all p< 0.05) with higher scores on the SETTI related to self efficacy