Investigating the relationship between mentoring and self-efficacy of novice teachers

Today, mentoring is common in most organizations, as well as education system of many countries. We don't have mentors in Iran, but many of their duties are informally covered by the school principal and veteran teachers. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the coverage of these functions in the primary schools of the south of Tehran and to find the relationship between this variable and the self-efficacy of the novice teachers. It was an applied study and the research method was descriptive and correlational. The statistical population of the study was 524 primary school novice teachers employed in 15-19 districts of Tehran. The sample size was calculated based on Cochran formula of 245 persons, and 232 questionnaires were completed. Data were collected using two self-efficacy questionnaires of Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy (2001) and a researcher-made questionnaire which was developed based on the mentoring questionnaire of Noe (1998) to measure mentoring. Their Cronbach Alpha were computed and they were 0.96 and 0.94, respectively. Descriptive statistics and Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients, and univariate regression were used to analyze the data. The results showed that there was a positive and significant relationship among mentoring and all of its sub-functions except 'counseling' and the novice teachers' self-efficacy) r=+0.712). Mentoring can also predict about 50 percent of the self-efficacy variable. Also, the amount of implementation of these functions, especially the function of "coaching" in the research population was estimated to be very low. This implies that a formal role must be defined in our education system as 'Mentor'.