Self-efficacy (SE), defined by Bandura (1997, p. 3) in his social-cognitive theory (SCT) as the “beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments”, has become the focus of researchers in several fields of social sciences in the last decades. Bandura (1977) suggests that these beliefs function as a mediator of peoples’ skills and knowledge on their perception of what they can do. Thus, SE is believed to have an influence on an individual’s goals, choice of activities, and their accomplishments, as well as the amount of effort people invest, and the resistance or resilience they demonstrate when facing a difficult or challenging task (Bandura, 1977, 1993). A considerable amount of research supports the claim that SE has a significant relationship with human behaviour in a variety of contexts and/or cultures (Kim & Beehr, 2017; Osteen et al., 2017; Parkinson et al., 2017).

In the area of education, when looking for possible variables that could explain and determine the quality of teachers’ classroom behaviour and effectiveness, Tschannen-Moran et al. (1998) adapted the concept of Bandura’s SE to the teaching context defining it as the beliefs teachers hold towards their capabilities in conveying successfully different teaching tasks through a variety of actions. Several studies have demonstrated that high teachers’ self-efficacy (TSE) has a direct influence on stronger commitment, willingness to adapt to new reforms, implement new teaching strategies, and improve the overall teaching-learning process (Brighton, 2003; Chesnut & Burley, 2015; Derrington & Campbell, 2015; Donnell & Gettinger, 2015; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2007). On the other hand, teachers with lower SE are more likely to feel less enthusiastic, to have less control on the educational environment, to experience higher level of stress, job anxiety, as well as burnout, and are more likely to abandon their profession (Malinen & Savolainen, 2016; Schunk & Pajares, 2009; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2007; Zee & Koomen, 2016). Although Bandura (1997) viewed SE as a universal construct valid across distinct cultural settings, authors such as Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy (2007) and Schunk and Pajares (2009) suggested that TSE is context-specific. As a result, TSE has been studied in different educational and cultural settings, the former looking closely at its relation to educational level and subjects taught, school setting, socio-economic matters, or school leadership (Lee et al., 2013; Paletta et al., 2017; Raudenbush et al., 1992; Walan & Chang Rundgren, 2014).

According to Tschannen-Moran et al. (1998) the need for understanding teachers’ judgements about their abilities to influence student achievement has its roots related to the Research ANd Development organization (RAND), which, for that purpose, created two questionnaire items in the mid 1970s, followed by a measure proposed by Gibson and Dembo (1984), extending the original RAND’s instrument to two factors measuring: 1) personal teaching efficacy (i.e., belief that one has abilities and skills to promote students’ learning) and 2) general teaching efficacy (i.e., belief that any teacher’s efficacy is affected by external factors, such as family influence/background, or social environment). However, many concerns occurred questioning the instrument’s relevance and conceptual soundness related to the variable of environmental obstacles within the “general teaching efficacy” factor (Klassen et al., 2009). Since then, there have been many attempts in creating suitable TSE instruments with the intention to more precisely reflect the vast concept of teaching environment. Yet, the Teachers’ Sense of Self-Efficacy Scale (TSES) developed by Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy (2001), both in the long (24-item) and the short (12-item) form, remains the most prominent one (Fives & Buehl, 2010; Klassen et al., 2011). Its original structure was built on a three-factor model: efficacy in instructional strategies (EIS), which addresses to the strategies teachers use in order to help their students learn a specific material; efficacy in classroom management (ECM) refers to teachers’ perception of their abilities to run a smooth class, which in fact underlines the effectiveness of the instructional strategies applied; and efficacy in student engagement (ESE), concerning how well a teacher can motivate students and create an appropriate learning environment in which its participants would be present both physically and psychologically. TSES is claimed to be among the leading instruments explaining the interpretation and conceptualization of any teacher’s success, upon which TSE beliefs are fostered. This model has been widely tested and supported in other studies, proving its construct validity and reliability (Holzberger et al., 2013; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2007).

Although a vast number of findings from prior research generally indicates that TSES represents a multidimensional construct with three latent correlated factors, recent studies have raised questions and issues regarding this structure. For instance, Nie et al. (2012) suggested that the three-factor structure may not be the only fitting solution to understand the relation between TSE and classroom occurrences, adding that some items within the same factor seem to refer to distinct skills. This finding may explain why, when conducting exploratory factor analysis, some items of the TSES were found with low or double loading (Wolters & Daugherty, 2007) or were not loaded (Fives & Buehl, 2010). Also, a study carried out in China, Korea, and Japan obtained contradictory results for the 24-item long form of TSES, raising concerns on the content validity of the instrument (Ruan, et al., 2015). Among the main problems that authors have displayed about the structure of TSES, students’ misbehaviours and how teachers feel capable of coping with them have covered a large portion of the recent literature. Sun (2015) mentions that misbehaviours are those students’ conducts that prevent the teaching-learning process to follow its regular course. They are characterized by violation of both implicit and explicit classroom norms and require an intervention of teachers in order to be contained and/or stopped (Sun & Shek, 2012).

In TSES, teachers’ perceived efficacy about dealing with problem students is embedded in the larger ECM factor. However, in recent years several authors have underlined the need to consider SE towards students’ misconduct as a separate concept. For instance, Sass et al. (2016) describe efficacy in classroom management as a combination of two distinct domains, instructional and behavioural management, only moderately correlated (Martin & Sass, 2010). Another research on TSE recognized two domains, “support of learning and organization of classroom” and “engagement and behaviour” (Malmberg et al., 2014). These findings are supported by Di Santo et al. (2017), who considered classroom practices and children’s behaviour as separate constructs, both correlated with pre-service teachers’ beliefs. The direct relation between students’ misconducts and TSE is addressed in several recent studies (Butler & Monda-Amaya, 2016; Hasting & Bham, 2003; Sorlie et al., 2016). According to Tsouloupas, Carson, and MacGregor (2014), students’ misbehaviours can negatively affect teachers’ psychology; consequently, an effective management of these conducts is necessary in order to improve general classroom climate, academic achievement, and individual productivity. The authors add that it is important to specifically analyse teachers’ efficacy beliefs in coping with misconduct situations, as they are key indicators of the quality of the teaching-learning process. This idea is the basis of a conceptual stream called Teacher Efficacy in Handling Student Misbehaviour (TEHSM; Tsouloupas et al., 2010). Zee, Koomen, et al. (2016) mention that TSE may change significantly based on the type of students a teacher has to deal with, emphasizing the role of pupils’ misbehaviours as a factor determining important fluctuations across domains in teachers’ perceived efficacy (Zee, de Jong, et al., 2016). The authors continue stating that SE could be affected by whether teachers’ affirm that teachers may respond too optimistically about general class management situations, whereas they show less self-confidence in items on coping with disruptive students for they tend to connect those questions with concrete and real previous experiences (Zee et al., 2016). Therefore, isolating efficacy towards disruptive students may enhance the predictive validity of TSES (Wyatt, 2014).

For all the above-mentioned, the objective of this study was to test and compare two structural models of TSES, the first (T-TSES) being a three-factor model based on the original theory by Tschannen-Moran et al. (1998) and the second (A-TSES) using a four-factor structure in accordance with the latest scientific and practical evidence on TSE.

The design of this study is quantitative, non-experimental with observational character.

The aim of this study was to test and contrast two structural models for the TSES questionnaire, one being the original three-factor form proposed by Tschannen-Moran et al. (1998), the other being a four-factor structure based on the latest research findings in the field of SE and education. In both models, items 3, 7, and 23 were discarded as they were affecting negatively the soundness of both structures. Item 3 (“How much can you do to control disruptive behaviour in the classroom?”) was originally assigned to ECM (T-TSES) and ESM (A-TSES). However, the question may have been interpreted by teachers in a different way compared to other items in the same factors; in fact, it seems to imply teachers’ perception of their efficacy in “directing”, or “having a control over” (Oxford Living Dictionaries - English, 2017; Royal Spanish Academy, 2017), a certain behaviour rather than in responding to it after its occurrence, which appears to be the focal point of most of the questions composing those factor/s. Regarding items 7 (“How well can you respond to difficult questions from your students?”) and 23 (“How well can you implement alternative strategies in your classroom?”), they underline a modern, student-centred approach of teaching, such as pupils’ active learning strategies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that Mexican teachers are among those mostly using teacher-directed instructions, providing students with less freedom and autonomy to actively participate in the classroom (OECD, 2016). This data is consistent with the findings of Camacho Zambrano (2016), who found out that Mexican teachers strongly adhere to a traditional teaching model based on the mere reproduction of knowledge in a constrained teaching setting, at the same time as they show little expertise and application of the current trends of educational practices. This could be a consequence of the structure and contents of Mexican higher education and continuing education programs for teachers mainly employing traditional practices (Nava-Gómez & Reynoso-Jaime, 2015; OCDE, 2010). Therefore, the discrepancy between the content of the eliminated items and the specific educational setting of our sample may explain their low saturation in both proposed models.

Both models comprised 21 items, and both fitted our dataset. While the tendency is commonly to be conservative when a traditional, well known, and deeply tested model equals a more innovative approach (Blunch, 2015), in our case the chi square difference test showed that A-TSES represents an even better fit than T-TSES. Splitting the ECM factor into two, and thus emphasizing the importance of efficacy in students’ misbehaviour as a stand-alone construct connected to TSE in a different way than regular classroom management, seems to make sense in the light of the findings of studies in the field of education carried out in the last five years. We need to consider the changes that education has faced over the years, especially in the dynamics of the teaching-learning processes. In fact, nowadays teachers report to have to deal with students’ challenging behaviours at least once a day (Butler & Monda-Amaya, 2016; Scott, 2017). As Butler and Monda-Amaya (2016) suggest, these challenging behaviours have a huge impact both on students and on teachers. Pupils’ negative conducts can escalate to a point at which teachers’ perceived efficacy is fully depressed, leading some of them to even quit their job (Scott, 2017; Sharafi et al.. 2016). Flower et al. (2017) mention that currently many students with behavioural issues are served in general education classrooms, this marking a positive change towards integration compared to older approaches (having separated special classrooms in extreme cases), at the same time as it implies more challenges for teachers in order to provide all pupils with equal opportunities to learn and grow (Scott, 2017). As a matter of fact, both in-service and pre-service teachers declare to have high concerns on how to efficiently manage situations generated by disruptive conducts during classes (Glock & Kleen, 2017). For this reason, authors suggest that assessing behaviour management skills is critical to any successful educational context (Flower et al., 2014). Our findings are in line with the above-mentioned studies and seem to support the stream of research on TEHSM (Tsouloupas, Carson, & Matthews et al., 2014). Also, they are backed up by several empirical studies in different educational settings, either recommending the specific assessment of efficacy in pupils’ misconducts as a separated domain from efficacy in classroom management (Di Santo et al., 2017; Malmberg et al., 2014; Sass et al., 2016) or hinting at the need to increase the structural robustness of TSES (Nie et al., 2012; Zee, Koomen et al., 2016; Wyatt, 2014).

The traditional structure of TSES is confirmed to have a good soundness, despite the need to remove three items, which could have depended on the specific demographic characteristics of the sample selected for this study. Previous literature in the field of education supports T-TSES has a solid instrument for measuring TSE (Holzberger et al., 2013; Klassen et al., 2011; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2007).

However, the changes that educational systems have suffered in recent years have highlighted the need for an adjustment of the original tool to better reflect the current state of teaching-learning processes in the classroom (Fives & Buehl, 2010; Nie et al. 2012; Tsouloupas et al., 2014). The alternative questionnaire tested in the present study, the A-TSES, represents a valid and modern structural model for TSES, which describes the interaction between teachers’ perceived efficiency and classroom dynamics respecting the theoretical foundation of the questionnaire at the same time as it responds to the needs originated from the contemporary state of educational settings worldwide (Butler & Monda-Amaya, 2016; Scott, 2017).