Teachers’ Critical Thinking and Self-efficacy as Predictors of their Pedagogical Success

Critical thinking and self-efficacy are important teacher characteristics which have received widespread attention in the recent literature on teacher education. These features have been found to influence teachers and their learners in various ways. Although research has investigated the relationship between each of these characteristics and teachers’ pedagogical success, to the best knowledge of the authors, no study has been done to see which characteristic is a better predictor of teachers’ pedagogical success from their student’s point of view. Therefore, the purpose of this study was particularly to investigate the effect of Iranian foreign teachers’ critical thinking and self-efficacy beliefs on their pedagogical success as evaluated by their students. To this end, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal Form A, and Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale were administered to 100 teachers. For each teacher, six students were also asked to complete the Characteristics of Successful Iranian Language Teachers Questionnaire. The data were analyzed through the Pearson correlation and multiple regression tests and the results showed that self-efficacy could better predict the pedagogical success of teachers. Moreover, the results indicated that among sub-constructs of self-efficacy, efficacy for instructional strategies could best predict teachers’ pedagogical success. The results of this study imply the importance of self-efficacy of teachers especially for devising and using instructional strategies. Therefore, teachers need to improve their self-efficacy perceptions if they want to be viewed as more successful by their students, and teacher educators also should pay more attention to self-efficacy issues in pre-service and in-service training programs.