Peter Elliott

Professor Grutsch McKinney

English 601

15 February 2011

Dissertation Analysis

I chose to analyze Perceptions of Self-Efficacy in Graduate Assistant Composition

Instructors: A Study of Novice Instructors’ Feelings About the Adequacy of Their Preparation

for Teaching. The dissertation was approved in April 2005.

In searching the Ball State dissertation database, the abstract immediately drew my

attention as it touched upon professional issues very closely related to my experiences. The

author, Janalee Shaw, took a look at how graduate students viewed themselves and their

preparation for teaching freshmen composition classes. Shaw based her study on quantitative

data compiled through surveys sent to Rhetoric and Composition doctoral candidates at

universities around the country. I had been a print journalist for 11 years before earning my

Masters in Elementary Education from Ball State in 2004. I taught middle school Language Arts

for four years in a public school setting before disappointingly recognizing that teaching at that

level was not my best career path. I’m currently in my second year as adjunct faculty at

Anderson University and absolutely love working with undergraduates on their writing and

research skills.

In her dissertation, Shaw also touched on the previous teaching experiences of doctoral

students, which further cemented my interest in her research. While I have quite a few criticisms

and see paths to branch off into other research, overall I think Shaw touched on plenty of

relevant material in her work.

While sifting through introductory research in the preface, Shaw brought up the idea of

how word-of-mouth sharing of tips and teaching strategies are part of the “initiation stories” said

she found looking at professional literature in the 1990s and early 2000s (Shaw 13). She

specifically quoted from Stephen North and his description of “teacher lore” as an additional

basis for the importance of this information. A colleague she interviewed named Cathy reported

a laundry list of issues related to the struggles of new teaching assistants including how to plan

lectures, using exams as learning tools, managing challenges to authority by students and dealing

with student conflicts over a social issue (12). Shaw also quotes and references heavily

throughout the dissertation from Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors & Expectations, specifically

referencing in the preface that Shaughnessy had to “develop her own techniques and laboriously

invent her own pedagogy” (18).

Shaw’s introduction does a good job of setting the stage for the specifics of her research.

She discusses how she will use a scale developed by Toni Tollerud in her 1990 dissertation for a

counseling psychology doctorate at the University of Iowa. Shaw adapts Tollerud’s measurement

techniques of how prepared graduate students felt in their teaching responsibilities in psychology

and use it with composition graduate students (30). It is referred to as the “Tollerud SETI,” with

the acronym referring to Self-Efficacy Toward Teaching Inventory. Shaw also introduces the

work of educational psychologist Albert Bandura – whose work I was somewhat familiar with

from my education Masters – who developed the theory of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is,

according to Shaw quoting Bandura, “the conviction that one can successfully execute the

behavior required to produce the outcomes.” These two elements -- the Tollerud measurement

and the idea of teaching confidence being born out of experience and solid pedagogical

knowledge gained through graduate studies – create the framework for her three avenues of

study and prediction:

1. Training before and during teaching assistants’ first semester(s) in the classroom

would improve self-efficacy.

2. Prior teaching experience at any level would translate into improved self-efficacy

toward teaching composition.

3. Women’s self-efficacy would be lower because of Shaw’s view of academia

traditionally being a male-dominated construct (34).

In the first of her two literature review chapters, Shaw does a thorough analysis of the

development of composition research and pedagogy – again quoting periodically from North –

discussing how the fields have grown substantially since the 1960s. She credits English

departments with recognizing the need for teaching assistants to be well-versed in theory, be

given timely feedback on their teaching and regularly meeting with professors for guidance.

Shaw’s second literature review chapter deals with the concept of how much self-efficacy

new composition teachers have. She makes one of her best points of the dissertation when she

ties the idea of new teacher anxiety to self-efficacy and classroom performance, “Student anxiety

is a recognized and very real element of the Composition classroom. The possibility that teachers

who are facing those anxious students may also be experiencing feelings of anxiety has not

received the same amount of attention by our field. Research into teacher anxiety, however,

points out that there may be a very real and disturbing connection between teacher effectiveness

and level of anxiety or discomfort with the subject he is teaching” (76-77). Conversely, Shaw

makes vast generalizations regarding perceived gender-based self-efficacy, a point which will be

further addressed after discussing methodology.

Shaw does a nice job of explaining how she modified the SETI at the outset of her

methodology, adapting its protocols for composition students. She uses a survey with a one

through five Likert Scale asking fellow doctoral students how they feel on a wide range of topics

referring to her three main hypotheses. Included is a demographic questionnaire probing

background information and a teaching experience and graduate training questionnaire which

asks specific questions about prior teaching experiences, teaching experiences during graduate

school and pedagogy learned during graduate school (187-189).

I believe her research methods are generally sound, but there are some elements which

certainly could be expanded upon or reorganized. In discussing the instrumentation of

quantitative research on page 149 of Research Design, Creswell identifies the need for construct

validity on “whether the scores serve a useful purpose and have positive consequences when they

are used in practice” (ref. Humbley & Zumbo 1996). In the final discussion section, Shaw seems

to recognize this herself as a weakness of her work, stating that the study did not work through

the nuances between schools’ programs participating in the survey and how feelings of self-

efficacy could be applied toward improvement in specific programs (145-146). This seems to

point to further avenues for qualitative investigation of a specific program or programs, perhaps

best as a quasi-experiment with pre-tests, post-tests and the use of established groups. (Lauer &

Asher 179)

I believe another methodological criticism goes to how Lauer & Asher define

instrumentation flaws as threats to internal validity (166). While Shaw did a good job of

reaching out to a wide number of doctoral programs and students and her 38 percent rate of

return on initial survey forms was quite good, the amount of randomization she ends up with her

data falls short of the target Lauer & Asher set out. The cross-section of schools which provided

specific data on their pedagogical training for Rhetoric and Composition graduate students

consists primarily of large state universities, and there are only 15 universities which provided

specific background information to Shaw (Appendix C). While I applaud the efforts Shaw put

forth in trying to contact all the schools in the United States which offer graduate Rhetoric and

Composition programs, the amount of feedback she received threatens a key part of the

framework for her analysis.

I agree with Shaw in criticism she directs at herself in her methodology section where she

saw unexpected confusion and ambiguity on her Likert Scale with intermediate choices of

“somewhat confident” and “slightly confident” (111). Shaw reported many respondents

invalidated their surveys by inserting their own measurements or expressing concern over the

semantic similarities of these choices. Shaw admitted she was caught off-guard by these

discrepancies in large part because such questions had not popped up during her pilot studies at

Ball State.

As for the content of her three avenues of study and prediction, there are some places of

criticism and disagreement.

Regarding training in pedagogical background for graduate assistants, I believe Shaw is

on the mark insisting that assistants need to have solid consistent feedback from professors and

grounding in teaching techniques. However, in discussing the anxiety new teachers feel – while

certainly tangible – she makes stretches of logic in her comparison. One poignant example

comes on page 77 during her literature review of self-efficacy where she equates teacher anxiety

to the anxiety non-native or ESL students feel trying to communicate in a classroom. Teachers of

composition, no matter how uncomfortable, almost universally have reached that point in their

career with years of English instruction and many student experiences grounding them in how a

classroom should function. While this certainly does not discount the anxiety they may feel and

struggles with the inevitable slip-ups in class, the cultural experience of education from an early

age provides a background which surpasses the experiences of a non-native speaker, particularly

if they are coming from significantly different cultural background in their home or in their own

educational backgrounds.

Shaw’s analysis of prior teaching experiences translating into improved self-efficacy

toward teaching composition also had flaws. While her data showed strong agreement across the

board amongst graduate assistants who had previous teaching experience, she falls short in her

suggestions of how Rhetoric and Composition programs could be improved to even better serve

its students. One sentence which particularly caught my attention was, “It is not my goal to

suggest that methods classes be incorporated into the curriculum” (132). I found this

contradictory to the strong connection she made between teaching experience to comfort in front

of the classroom and the need to fill that experience gap with pedagogical training. I sense that

Shaw is wary of Rhetoric and Composition programs morphing into too much of a teacher

education program – which I understand – however if specific coursework in secondary level

teaching methods or educational psychology could be blended into programs for graduate

students, it could be beneficial. I also found it ironic since Shaw’s applications of Bandura’s self-

efficacy was a central component to her research design.

Shaw’s final point states that women have lower self-efficacy since academia has

traditionally been a male-dominated profession. Shaw does a good job of analyzing general

academic history and correctly illustrates how women had few and far between leadership roles

until recent decades. Yet overall I felt she was simply selling cultural shifts and women’s ability

to adapt to professional demands too short. Shaw wrote that in order to succeed in academia,

women must shed off ingrained cultural expectations of nurturing and facilitating and adapt to a

more competitive approach of male one-upsmanship. Her data analysis showed that women’s

feelings of self-efficacy toward their teaching skills increased as they gained experience in the

classroom while men tended to stay flat or even slightly decrease in feelings of self-efficacy. She

uses what I felt were broad generalizations that women showed this improvement as a shedding

of cultural stereotypes they may have grown up with while men entered programs with a greater

degree of self-confidence and machismo which ultimately was muted or declined once they got

their feet wet in the classroom. I found these broad brush strokes somewhat of a stretch to make

the data fit better with her initial hypotheses. I agree that experience is a factor in improved

feelings of self-efficacy for women during their graduate programs and that some men were

undoubtedly overconfident in their abilities to manage an undergrad classroom. I also feel that

there are a huge range of variables which are in play here as well, and that basing it solely on

cultural expectations is an overgeneralization.