The mediating effect of teacher efficacy in the relationship of collaborative activities and teaching competencies of Korean elementary school teachers: Evidence from TALIS 2018

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the mediating effect of teacher efficacy in therelationship of collaborative activities and teaching competencies of elementary school teachers. Methods: We analyzed the data of 3,165 Korean elementary school teachers of TALIS (TeachingAnd Learning International Study) 2018. Two mediating models (full mediation and partial mediationmodels) were compared,using Mplus 5.2.In particular, sampling weights of teachers were incorporatedin the structural equation modeling to account for possible selection bias. Results: Results are as follows. First,the mediating effect of teacher efficacy in the relationship ofcollaborative activities and teaching competencies was statistically significant. Second,the partial mediationmodel outperformed the full mediation model in terms of statistical significance and explanation. Conclusion: Teachers who actively participates in teacher collaboration were found to have higherefficacy, and higher efficacy in turn lead to higher teaching competencies.And teacher efficacy showsa significant mediating effect on teacher collaboration and teaching competencies. This study can beutilized as an evidence in designing and implementing effective teacher collaboration activities topromote teaching competencies. The fact that this study analyzed a large-scale dataset (TALIS) whichtargets the whole population of Korean elementary school teachers also contributes to the generalizationof the results.