Investigation of the relationship between the primary school teacher?s guidance practices and teacher efficacy

This is a descriptive type of research that examines the relationship between various variables, primary school teachers guidance practices and teacher efficacy. This is a comparative type of correlational survey.The population of this research consist of the primary schools in the metropolitan area of Uşak. The sample of research is composed of 309 teachers randomly selected from the population attending school in the academic year of 2008-2009.The data of this research were acquired by using two different scales. They were initially collected by ?Guidance and Counselling Applications Scale? tool which was developed by Tasdelen Karckay and the researcher. The scale was developed by the researcher following a research review and consultation with 3 field specialist who have PhD Guidance and Psychological Counselling. The validity and reliability of this scale was studied and it was gathered as one-dimensional. The Cronbach alpha coefficients of 21 items on the scale were found 0.94. The findings indicate that ?Guidance and Counselling Applications Scale ?was found as valid and reliable to apply.The second scale used in this research is ?Teacher Efficacy Scale? aimed to measure teacher competencies, developed by Gibson and Dembo, reviewed by Guskey and Passaro (1994) subsequently. Diken (2006) performed the adaptation of the scale into Turkish to assess the validity and reliability of the scale on Turkish teachers in Turkey. The reliability of this scale was measured by Cronbach Test. The internal consistency coefficient of 16 items on the scale was found 0.71, first dimension 0.71 and second dimension 0.73. Those findings demonstrate that ?Teacher Efficacy Scale? is valid and reliable to perform on Turkish teachers.This research supports that there is a significant and meaningful relation between guidance-counselling applications of elementary school classroom teachers and teacher competencies. According to correlations analysis, the most significant relation to teacher?s guidance-counselling applications is found to be teachers? competencies. As a result of progressive regression analysis, teacher competencies are established to be an important predictor for guidance-advice applications.Key Words:Teacher Efficacy, Guidance, Primary education teachers, Class teachers, Primary education schools, Teachers, Guidance practices.