Background
Identification and retention of effective teachers in STEM education play cardinal roles in teacher recruitment exercises worldwide. Studies on factors that characterize effective teachers have therefore gained popularity in recent times. Teacher self-efficacy, job satisfaction and school climate are among other factors that have attracted global attention. Thus, proper understanding of the relations between these factors is equally important. The purpose of this study is to validate and cross-validate a model of direct/indirect effects of school climate and teacher self-efficacy on job satisfaction.

Results
The data used for the current study are extracted from a publicly available data of Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 survey. Structural equation modeling approach was used in the analyses coupled with robust maximum likelihood to ensure accurate estimations in the models. The results of the validated models show a strong direct impact of school climate on job satisfaction, a direct impact of teacher self-efficacy on job satisfaction and a mediating effect of teacher self-efficacy between school climate and job satisfaction. This model exhibits structural invariance in factor loadings, intercepts and regression weights across two independent samples from a population of 3951 lower secondary school teachers in Norway.

Conclusion
The findings of this study do provide empirical evidence for the relations between teacher self-efficacy, job satisfaction and school climate among Norwegian lower secondary school teachers. The cross-validation of these relations was also established using an independent sample to enhance generalization of the findings. Two methodological observations concerning recoding of some items as well as an addition of item cross-loading in the measurement model of the job satisfaction scales are raised and addressed. It is therefore recommended that researchers who will be using TALIS 2018 data should take note of these observations.



中文翻译：

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学校气氛和教师自我效能感对大多数STEM教师工作满意度的影响：结构化多组不变性方法

背景技术
在STEM教育中，确定和保留有效的教师在全球教师招聘活动中起着关键作用。因此，有关表征有效教师的因素的研究近来越来越受欢迎。教师的自我效能感，工作满意度和学校氛围是引起全球关注的其他因素。因此，正确理解这些因素之间的关系同样重要。本研究的目的是验证和交叉验证学校氛围和教师自我效能感对工作满意度的直接/间接影响的模型。

结果
本研究使用的数据摘自2018年国际教学现状调查（TALIS）调查的公开数据。分析中使用了结构方程建模方法，并结合了稳健的最大似然性，以确保模型中的准确估计。验证模型的结果表明，学校气氛对工作满意度有直接的强烈影响，教师自我效能感对工作满意度的直接影响，以及教师自我效能感在学校气氛和工作满意度之间的中介作用。该模型在来自挪威3951名初中教师的两个独立样本中显示出因子负荷，截距和回归权重的结构不变性。

结论
这项研究的结果确实为挪威初中教师的教师自我效能感，工作满意度和学校氛围之间的关系提供了经验证据。还使用独立样本来建立这些关系的交叉验证，以增强发现的概括性。提出并解决了关于一些项目重新编码以及在工作满意度量表的测量模型中增加项目交叉加载的两种方法学观察。因此建议使用TALIS 2018数据的研究人员应注意这些观察结果。