The Mediating Effect of Academic Self-Efficacy in the Relationship between Middle School Students' Perceptions of Teaching Competencies and Math Achievement : Using Multi-level Structural Equation Modeling

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating effect of academic self-efficacy on the relationship between middle school students perceptions of teaching competencies and math achievement.

This study was based on the GEPS and used multi-level SEM to capture the hierarchical structure of the clustered data. Considering the limitations of previous empirical studies using SEM methodology to control the influences of confounding variables, this study included student and school-level covariates. Through model comparisons between two models: a model without covariates and the other model with both student and school-level covariates, the final research model was applied to analyze the effects of perceived teaching competencies and academic self-efficacy on academic achievement.

The study yielded a number of interesting results. Firstly, after controlling for student and school-level variables, the direct effect of perceived teaching competencies on academic achievement was shown to be statistically significant. The indirect effect, or the mediating influence of academic self-efficacy, was also statistically significant. Secondly, it was found that a model without covariates was likely to overestimate the effects of explanatory variables on academic achievement in contrast to the other model with covariates. This resulted in a huge difference in statistical significance between the models. Based on these findings, the educational implications and future research directions were discussed.