Teaching self-efficacy and its effects on quality of bedside teaching: Findings from a multi-center survey

Introduction: Evidence suggests that the performance of medical students is affected by the quality of teaching of clinical teachers, and the higher teachers’ teaching quality leads to better students’ clinical performance. Hence, the present research aimed to investigate the association between teaching self-efficacy and quality of bedside teaching among medical teachers. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study. To this end, 242 medical teachers and 830 medical students from 6 universities in different cities were selected using convenience sampling. The medical teachers filled out Physician Teaching Self-Efficacy Questionnaire (α=0.93), and medical students completed the quality of bedside teaching questionnaire (BST) (α=0.91). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), Pearson correlation coefficient, and multiple regression were used to analyze the collected data through SPSS 23 and Smart-PLS3 software. Results: The results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated that all items and measurement models had adequate reliability and validity to enter the final analysis (α>0.7, CR>0.7 an‎d AVE>0.50). Furthermore, the results showed teaching self-efficacy (r=0.27, P<0.001) and its components including self-regulation (r=0.24, P<0.001), dyadic regulation (r=0.22, P<0.001), and triadic regulation (r=0.33, P<0.001) had a positive and significant relationship with quality of bedside teaching. Also, the results of multiple regression revealed that among the predictor variables, only the triadic regulation variable could predict the quality of bedside teaching of medical teachers (β=0.326, P<0.001). Conclusion: According to the findings, as the medical teachers’ teaching self-efficacy improves, they can provide high-quality teaching to students, which in turn will lead to better learning and, therefore better performance for medical students.