A study on the influence of the consistency between career ideal and working environment on the creative self-efficacy of rural novice teachers in China

Abstract

The high-quality development of rural education is an important goal of China's education development, and is also an important measure to eliminate the gap between urban and rural educational resources and to promote educational equity. Rural teachers are considered to be the key factor affecting the quality of rural education, and the creative self-efficacy (CSE) of rural teachers in the early stage of their career development plays an important role in the transformation of these teachers into excellent teachers. According to self-efficacy theory, social support theory and self-determination theory, the career ideals and working environment of rural novice teachers should have a positive effect on the improvement of their CSE and comprehensive quality, but this relationship still needs to be verified. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the influence of the consistency between the career ideals and the working environment of rural novice teachers on their sense of CSE. In this study, 580 novice rural teachers in South China who had been in the classroom for 1-5 years were surveyed by purposive sampling using the Teacher Career Ideal scale, the Work Environment scale, the Creative self-efficacy scale and other tools. The results showed that the career ideal of rural novice teachers was positively correlated with their sense of CSE. There was a significant positive correlation between working environment and the CSE of rural novice teachers, while consistency between career ideal and working environment had a significant impact on their sense of CSE.