The Teachers’ Sense of Multicultural Efficacy Scale: Construction and Validation

Education: 2nd Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)Sense of efficacy, or one’s belief in his or her ability to facilitate change, has been cited as a predictor of many valuable educational outcomes for both students and teachers. Scales designed to measure teachers’ sense of efficacy have been developed in an effort to indentify both the best predictors of student and teacher success and reliable indicators of those predictors. The purpose of the current study was to develop a measure of teachers’ sense of efficacy for multicultural education. Whereas previous scales have measured only teachers’ sense of efficacy for general teaching tasks, they have not investigated the myriad aspects of multicultural education that may impact teacher efficacy. Because strong teacher efficacy has been linked, for example, with high student achievement, low efficacy for certain aspects of education may translate to low achievement. The Teachers’ Sense of Multicultural Efficacy Scale (TSMES) provides a manner of measuring teacher efficacy specifically for educating diverse students and for education about issues relating to diversity.A three-year embargo was granted for this item