Understanding out‐of‐field teacher self‐efficacy beliefs: A person‐centred approach

Abstract

Abstract Teaching out‐of‐field (OOF) has been a widespread global phenomenon and a cause of concern for school leaders and policymakers due to the potential impact it has on teaching quality and student learning. However, research on how the nature of OOF teaching impacts various teachers' psychological attributes such as teacher self‐efficacy (TSE) remains limited. This study took a person‐centred approach to identify profiles of OOF teachers who showed varied patterns of TSE beliefs and how such profiles are related to their prior mentoring and professional development (PD) experiences. Latent profile analysis conducted on a sample of 1193 Australian OOF teachers drawn from the TALIS 2018 data revealed four profiles of OOF TSE: an instructionally efficacious, an instructionally inefficacious, a moderately low efficacious and a globally efficacious profile. Results further suggest that OOF teachers in the more adaptive self‐efficacy profiles were less likely to have an assigned mentor and more likely to have participated in job‐embedded and research‐based PD initiatives. This study makes substantial contributions to the TSE literature by extending it to a unique teacher population and provides useful implications for the design and implementation of targeted PD programmes for OOF teachers.