Fostering teachers' trust in scientific evidence

Koch Anna Rosa, Binnewies Carmen, Dormann Christian

Zusammenfassung

Occupational decisions, as physicians’ decisions concerning a treatment, can be based on scientificevidence or gut feeling. Relying on scientific evidence improves decisions and leads to success.Therefore, identifying predictors of evidence orientation is important. We focus on the school’ contextand predictors of teachers’ trust in scientific evidence (e.g., when deciding about a curriculum’implementation). We hypothesized that principal’s transformational leadership, characterized byempowerment and change-orientation predicts teachers’ trust in scientific evidence. Also teachers’confidence to carry out proactive tasks, namely role breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) should be apredictor as well as moderator concerning trust in scientific evidence. We collected data from 1356teachers in 122 German schools. Results from multi-level models showed that principal’s hightransformational leadership as well as teachers’ high RBSE fostered trust in scientific evidence. RBSEwas also a moderator, in that the effect of transformational leadership was stronger when RBSE was high.