Teacher\u27s sense of self efficacy and grit and its relationship to student achievement

Darling-Hammond (2006) stated that “one of the most damaging myths prevailing in American education is the notion that good teachers are born and not made” (p. xi). On the other hand, if there is a need to improve the education system in the United States, there must be a conscientious effort to identify, recruit, select, and develop quality people to become teachers—there needs to be an emphasis on “quality people.” The purpose of this quantitative study is to determine the relationship between a high school teacher’s grit and sense of self-efficacy and the Houston Independent School District’s teacher’s Educator Value-Added Assessment System (EVASS) Performance Growth Level, which is a “conservative estimate of students’ academic progress (Houston ISD, 2015)” as measured by the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) End of Course (EOC) Assessments. The study took place in the Houston Independent School District which is the largest school district in the State of Texas and the seventh largest school district in the United States. The data was obtained from a survey that was sent via Survey Monkey to 604 current high school teachers assigned to the 19 Title One campuses that taught a content area associated with a State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) End of Course (EOC) assessment (English I, English II, Algebra I, Biology, and U.S. History). However, only 186 of the 604 teachers surveyed actually had student data linked to the district’s Educator Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS) for the 2014-2015 school year