Comparative Analysis of Novice, Moderately Experienced, and Highly Experienced Iranian EFL Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Focusing on Their Cognition, Metacognition, Affection, and Behavior

To compensate for the lack of evidential data on the changes in both hidden and observable constructs underlying teachers’ self-efficacy throughout their teaching life, the current study aimed at comparing patterns of cognition, metacognition, emotion, and behavior across three groups of Iranian EFL teacher with scant, moderate, and considerable teaching experience. To this end, a convenience sample including 382 Iranian EFL teachers were surveyed about five interrelated constructs including pedagogical knowledge, teaching reflection, motivational needs satisfaction, teaching styles use, and work engagement. The quantitative data gathered through five standard questionnaires were compared across the three groups based on a multivariate approach to comparison. According to the results, the three groups differed significantly on a linear combination of the five variables representing the latent and observable aspects of teacher efficacy. Additionally, the results drawn from discriminant function analysis (DFA) showed that among the five variables, pedagogical knowledge and motivational needs satisfaction acted as a concordant pair and explained the heaviest load of the overall between-group differences. The significantly higher levels of pedagogical knowledge and motivational needs satisfaction among the moderately experienced teachers, compared to those of their less and more experienced counterparts, suggested that Iranian EFL teachers’ sense of efficacy reaches its peak at the middle years of a teaching life. The findings may provide new insights into the ways of setting English teachers of various experiential background on the road to optimum efficacy.