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Teachers’ sense of responsibility for educational outcomes and its associations with teachers’ instructional approaches and professional wellbeing

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Abstract

Teachers’ formal accountability and duties have been the focus of high-stakes educational reforms, for instance in the context of national accountability systems. Yet, teachers’ sense of personal (rather than formal) responsibility and willingness to assume responsibility for their teaching and students remains an understudied area. The main purpose of this study was to investigate contextual and person-specific predictors of teachers’ sense of personal responsibility, as well as the potential implications of teachers’ personal responsibility for their instructional approaches and wellbeing. A path analysis indicated that high school teachers (n = 287) who felt responsible for their teaching and students reported higher levels of work engagement and job satisfaction than less responsible teachers, and were more likely to endorse mastery-oriented instructional practices that emphasized student effort, task mastery, and individual growth. Teachers’ perceptions of their school’s social climate (teachers’ evaluations of their relationships with students), their sense of teaching self-efficacy, and incremental beliefs of intelligence emerged as positive predictors of teacher responsibility. Teacher responsibility partially mediated the positive effects of these predictors on teachers’ wellbeing and mastery-oriented instructional practices. The results suggest that both contextual (e.g., school climate) and person-specific (e.g., self-efficacy) factors can contribute to teachers’ sense of personal responsibility, and that responsibility, in turn, can have positive implications for teachers’ wellbeing and instructional practices. Directions for future research and practical implications are considered.

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Notes

  1. The item “Factors beyond my control have a greater influence on my students’ achievement than I do” led to decreased internal consistency and decreased predictive validity of the overall scale. This item was therefore removed from the analyses. Excluding two additional reverse worded items would have improved the internal consistency of the scale further (up to α = .63; see van Sonderen et al. 2013, regarding psychometric challenges related to reverse worded items). However, the exclusion of these two additional items would have reduced the scale’s predictive validity in the present study. These items were therefore retained in our analyses, so we can explain additional variance in our outcome measures. Our main results are consistent with and without these items.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, via Filippo Re, 10, 40126, Bologna, Italy

    Maria Cristina Matteucci

  2. Department of Education, University of Bologna, Via Filippo Re, 6, 40126, Bologna, Italy

    Dina Guglielmi

  3. Department of Psychology and Bonn Centre for Teacher Education, University of Bonn, Poppelsdorfer Allee 15, 53115, Bonn, Germany

    Fani Lauermann

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  1. Maria Cristina Matteucci
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Matteucci, M.C., Guglielmi, D. & Lauermann, F. Teachers’ sense of responsibility for educational outcomes and its associations with teachers’ instructional approaches and professional wellbeing. Soc Psychol Educ 20, 275–298 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-017-9369-y

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