Relationship between self-efficacy beliefs and emotions of future teachers of Physics in secondary education

Bandura (1977) defines self-efficacy as beliefs in one's ability to organize and execute actions required to handle future situations. Put more simply, self-efficacy refers to a person's confidence that they can do what they have to do. For that author, the process of self-reflection allows individuals to assess their own experiences and thought processes. There are several lines of research on self-efficacy being pursued in the field of education. Most of them focus on the impact of self-efficacy on students' motivation, performance, and the development of their academic and professional interests and goals, highlighting the predictive value of self-efficacy (Brown et al., 2008; Valentine, DuBois & Cooper, 2004).

Self-efficacy is particularly related to the subject's behaviour, especially in activities ultimately aimed at attaining final success. This construct implies that the subject selects tasks that they are able to successfully carry out, to be persistent in their actions, maintaining effort over time, and seeking to acquire new skills from those tasks (Schunk, 1987).

According to Quintero, Pérez and Correa (2009), subjects who score positively on self-efficacy perform better in their chosen field, and there is also an influence on their personal judgement, creating a state of emotional calm focused on getting things done. In contrast, low levels of self-efficacy create emotional instability, resulting in a practice of general failure.

Teachers whose beliefs reflect high self-efficacy with which they feel capable of dealing with difficult situations in the classroom normally feel comfortable with what they do, and indeed enjoy it. The positive emotions they present are good predictors of satisfaction with the task of teaching. In contrast, teachers with low self-efficacy are sensitive to the anxiety associated with failure, and they approach difficult situations as if they constitute an ongoing threat (Ashton & Webb, 1986; Perrenoud, 1996). Furthermore, low teacher self-efficacy is related to professional burnout, to increased stress, and to numerous negative behavioural aspects in class planning, in the alternative ideas they have on scientific content (Jones & Carter 2007), and in the importance they attach to active learning (Enochs, Scharmann & Riggs 1995).

Schunk (1995) showed that past experiences influence achievement in future situations by maintaining high levels of self-efficacy with which to approach learning situations. Breso, Salanova, Martínez, Grau and Agut (2004) found a direct relationship between past success and expectations of future success. In sum therefore, successful experiences in the past increase self-efficacy and the expectations of achievements.

Moyne (1986) notes that what is transmitted in the classroom cannot be separated from the person who transmits it, since it is knowledge that is tied to a being who communicates. In particular, there is a connection between the cognitive and the emotional dimensions which characterizes the teaching profession. Hence, the emotions prospective teachers experience during their teacher education in experimental sciences could affect the emotional dimension and beliefs that their own future pupils will have towards them (Gómez-Chacón, 1998; Bermejo, 1996). For pupils to acquire meaningful learning, it is essential that their teacher's actions are characterized by positive attitudes (Cervantes, Cappello & Castro, 2009).

The ability to cope with problems and the emotions they generate is a key element in the learning process. It is particularly important to empower these aspects in the initial stages of the teaching profession when they begin to be consolidated, because then over time they will become more resistant to change (Prieto, 2007).

In teacher education, it is necessary to bear in mind that prospective science teachers carry with them a body of knowledge, conceptions, attitudes, and emotions about teaching and learning different subjects which is the result of the many years they spent as pupils at school (Mellado, Bermejo, Blanco & Ruiz, 2008). Oosterheert and Vermunt (2001) include the regulation of emotions as a functional component of learning to teach science. Teacher training is a space in which these aspects need to be considered so that prospective teachers will be able to control and self-regulate their emotions (Brígido, Borrachero, Bermejo & Mellado, 2013). The relationship between self-efficacy and emotions has been recognized in the analyses that some authors have made of these two constructs. For Saarni (2000), emotional competence is the demonstration of self-efficacy in expressing emotions in social transactions. Self-efficacy requires awareness of one's own emotions and the ability to regulate them to achieve one's desired results.

The study on prospective primary teachers of Brígido et al. (2013) found most of them to have positive emotions towards nature sciences but negative ones towards the hard sciences. Their beliefs concerning their self-efficacy were significantly related to their emotions about their future teaching of the hard sciences: high self-efficacy was significantly correlated with more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions towards physics and chemistry.

Other recent work has addressed the empirical study of some emotional states as sources of self-efficacy in secondary school teachers. Martínez and Salanova (2005) show in a sample of teachers that low levels of self-efficacy are preceded by high levels of negative emotions. Ritchie, Tobin, Hudson, Roth and Mergard (2011), in a study of a novice science teacher, find that positive emotions are related to the achievement of positive expectations and to the failure of the actual fulfilment of negative expectations, while negative emotions are related to the failure to achieve positive expectations. Other work has also shown that certain negative emotions can act as mediators between self-efficacy and its facilitators or obstacles, indicating that the fact of experiencing a negative emotional state affects the levels of self-efficacy (García, Llorens, Salanova & Cifre, 2006).