contextual factors

Teachers’ sense of efficacy belief has been introduced as a context-specific construct, but the related literature is not clear on this specificity. This study was an attempt to show how contextual factors influence efficacy beliefs among English language teachers. To this end, thirty Iranian EFL teachers working in both school and private institute contexts were chosen as the participants to respond to Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Beliefs questionnaire (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001) twice: once based on school context and once based on private institute context. Afterwards, the participants were invited to a brief interview designed to investigate further the reasons for which they had scored higher in either context. The interview findings and the results of a t-test revealed that context really made a difference. It is argued that the proper or improper functioning of efficacy building sources is the cause of the difference

Teacher efficacy is an essential psychological variable which is linked to student achievement, motivation, and even student self-efficacy. Moreover, teachers' self-efficacy beliefs play an essential role in the context of reform initiatives by mediating any behavioral change. The relevant literature reports conflicting findings on the sources, however. Such being the case, the present study aimed at speculating on the sources of self-efficacy among Iranian EFL teachers who participated in this study. To this aim, individual interviews were conducted with 18 English language teachers teaching in middle schools up to the point when data saturation was achieved. Moreover, the participating teachers were asked to keep journals in order to keep a record of the significant experiences that captured their attention concerning their self-efficacy beliefs during one semester. The data were analyzed using grounded theory procedures in which open, axial, and selective coding were applied to extract the themes (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). The results of the study indicated that Bandura's (1997) four sources of self-efficacy information including mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and physiological/emotional states played a crucial role in forming Iranian EFL teachers' efficacy beliefs. In addition to these sources, "teacher competence" and “contextual factors” appeared as two other influential factors affecting Iranian EFL teachers’ efficacy beliefs.

The purpose of this research was to identify and prioritize effective factors in social responsibility of professors of Islamic Azad University of Qazvin branch which was conducted in 2014 and 2015. Among all statistical population which included 395 professors of the university, 195 professors were selected as statistical subjects from the population. In this research, it was attempted that by using written sources, views of experts, field investigation, and also interview with experts, a questionnaire be designed to identify the said factors. The instrument used for collecting information was the questionnaire. To determine formal and content validity of the questionnaire (the proposed indexes), content validity was used, and in order to determine reliability factor, Cronbach's Alpha method was used for 5-Choice questionnaire of Likert. Then required data of the research were collected and by using statistical descriptive and inferential techniques, date analysis was conducted by SPSS software. Results indicated that structural dimension has the highest effect on accepting social responsibility among behavioral, structural, and contextual dimensions.