Elementary School Teachers’ Teaching Competence as a Predictor of their Professional Commitment

Abstract

This explanatory correlational design study mainly analyzed elementary school teachers’ views to ascertain relationship between teachers’ perceived level of teaching competence and their commitment to teaching profession. To achieve the main objective, all (13358) teachers currently employed in 1072 public and private elementary schools of district Vehari were considered as study population. To measure elementary school teachers’ perceived teaching competencies, a scale comprising 30 items was developed keeping in view the example of Passi and Lalitha (2005) while professional commitment scale comprising 21 items developed by Prince et al. (2022) was used to collect required data about teachers’ perceived commitment to their profession. Researchers approached 1356 randomly selected teachers and sought their views regarding both the variables and finally 1095 (80.75%) sample participants returned properly completed questionnaire valid for data analysis. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficient method and standard multiple regression technique was used to analyze the collected data. Results set forth that sample teachers' perceived level of teaching competence and professional commitment was high. Likewise, teaching competence was found to be substantially related with professional commitment. Results also suggested that teachers’ perceived competence in teaching had positive and significant effect in predicting their professional commitment. Finally, this study recommends that programs for teachers’ professional development as well as their in-service training may be organized frequently to further boost their teaching competencies.