College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item EMOTIONS AND COPING IN THE CONTEXT OF TEACHING: REFLECTIONS OF PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS(2021) Briody, Jill Margaret; Teglasi, Hedwig; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Teaching is an emotional roller coaster. Not enough pre-service teachers are prepared for the daily barrage of emotions they will experience when they enter the professional world or for the critical need they will have to effectively manage those emotions. Limited awareness of the role of emotions and management thereof may lead to reduced effectiveness in the classroom and higher rates of burnout. The current mixed methods study explored how pre-service teachers from an elementary education undergraduate program at a large Mid-Atlantic public University think about their emotions and the management of those emotions in the context of teaching. Emotions are a difficult construct to accurately capture and research often relies on self-report measures to do so. In addition to self-report measures, this study employed narratives, about significant teaching experiences to examine more deeply pre-service teachers’ emotions, the situations that elicit those emotions, and the management of those emotions through coping. Results indicated that pre-service teachers reflect on a range of emotions, with 95% mentioning negative emotions when writing about a classroom experience and 96% mentioning positive emotions. The most frequently used category of emotion words was “fear,” by almost 70% of participants. Furthermore, almost 60% of pre-service teachers agreed that they regularly experience waves of strong feelings about their teaching experience, when responding to items on the Impact of Event Scale-Adapted. Yet almost 60% of pre-service teachers described coping that was coded as unrealistic or non-coping in at least one of their narratives. While almost all pre-service teachers included emotions in writing about significant teaching experiences, very few reported emotions or coping as a concern when asked explicitly what they were worried about. Among the situations that elicited the most negative emotions and/or were reported as most worrisome were the shift in responsibility from mentor teacher to pre-service teacher, lesson planning, time management, individual student social-emotional well-being, and whole class behavior/classroom management. The current study illustrated the importance of using multiple methods to capture the complexities of multifaceted constructs like emotions and coping. Implications for pre-service teachers, educator preparation programs, and researchers are discussed.Item COPING AS A MEDIATOR OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STRESS REACTIVITY AND TEACHING OUTCOMES(2019) Kim, Margaret Jordan; Teglasi, Hedwig; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)To understand the origins of burnout in early-career teachers, the current study proposed that individual differences in stress reactivity and coping effectiveness would contribute to end-of-year teaching outcomes for student teachers in their final teaching placements as interns. Stress reactivity is a biologically-based individual difference that influences the intensity and duration of an individual stress response, while coping is the process through which external and internal stressors are addressed. Patterns of coping behavior and stress reactivity are often linked in research, as reactivity is thought to influence the intensity of stress, and thus also the emotional experiences with which individuals must cope. A preponderance of research investigates specific coping strategies and this study instead focuses on coping effectiveness in the face of negative emotions and challenging conditions. Two distinct mediation models were proposed. The first model hypothesized that stress reactivity would influence teaching self-efficacy indirectly through self-rated coping efficacy, and results revealed a significant negative indirect effect. This suggests that stress reactivity negatively influences one’s perceptions of their ability to cope with their emotions, which in turn has a negative influence on perceptions of teaching self-efficacy. The second model predicted that stress reactivity would influence evaluations of student teacher performance, through performance measures of coping effectiveness. Mediation analysis did not reveal a significant indirect effect, but did reveal a significant positive pathway from performance coping to supervisor evaluations of student teachers. A significant positive correlation between stress reactivity and performance coping was also identified and stands in contrast to the negative correlation between stress reactivity and self-rated coping efficacy. The unique direction of association across methods of measurement underlines the idea that performance and self-rated measures capture distinct facets of a construct, and that multiple approaches to measurement are crucial for a full understanding of functioning under stress. Results from the performance model open the door for continued investigation of alternate methods for understanding and assessing individual differences in coping. Implications of the findings for literature on stress reactivity, coping, and teacher stress and burnout are discussed.