What Drives Research Faculty

Today, we would like to share a 2009 article by Evans and Tress, entitled What Drives Research-focused University Academics to Want to Teach Effectively?: Examining Achievement, Self-efficacy and Self-esteem. The authors pose the question, “What motivates research-focused academics, employed at a leading research university, to want to teach well, particularly considering that many of them may prioritize research above teaching?”

Qualitative data from a 1997 study were used to present an overview by 18 academics, and these data are supplemented by the current data. The research applied a ‘feasibility-determined analysis’, hypothesizing that academics were motivated by self-esteem needs, which, in turn, were fed by self-efficacy beliefs and the pursuit of a sense of achievement. The authors operationalize self efficacy as ‘the perception of having the skills and ability to help students learn. Further, citing Bandura (2000) they share that “perceived self-efficacy is a belief that one can perform using one’s skills and abilities adequately in a certain circumstance”.

Finally, the authors indicate that there are self-efficacy measurement instruments such as Postareff 2008 four-item scale that was adapted from Pintrich’s (1998) motivation model for learning. The authors fully accept that this analysis is fraught with reliability- and validity-related limitations and that it represents reasoned conjecture, rather than scientific robustness. Therefore, further research in this area would be beneficial.