From Beliefs to Practice: A Critical Re-examination of Teacher Academic Optimism in Swiss Primary Schools

Academic Optimism—a second-order construct comprising teacher self-efficacy, academic emphasis,and trust in students and parents—has been consistently linked to student outcomes. Yet both its dimensional structure and its translation into practice remain underexplored. Drawing on data from Swiss primary school teachers, this presentation synthesises three studies that critically re-examine Academic Optimism by tracing its pathway from teacher beliefs to classroom practice. The first study zooms into the efficacy facet, addressing foundational measurement questions: Do efficacy beliefs differ when teachers reference themselves versus their team? Using confirmatory factor, bifactor, and latent profile analyses, findings challenge assumptions about the efficacy’s dimensionality. The second study investigates whether Academic Optimism predicts teachers’ learning transfer following coaching, employing structural equation modelling to distinguish transfer intention from enactment. The third study presents preliminary analyses testing whether Academic Optimism translates into instructional quality, using longitudinal student-report data to move beyond the self-report measures dominating prior research. Together, these studies contribute both methodological insights into measuring teacher beliefs and substantive evidence on how Academic Optimism operates in practice.

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