Academic Self-Efficacy of the Beginning University Teachers

The article deals with the selected aspects of academic self-concept of the beginning university teachers in the framework of their professional self-concept. Our research sample consists of respondents from the selected Spanish, Czech, and Chinese universities. The main aim is to analyze selected aspects of academic self - concept: motivational beliefs, self-efficacy, metacognitive strategies and meaningfulness of studies. Academic self-concept is the idea of students' academic abilities and directly influences our learning process, academic achievement, and the expectations we have from our studying. This self-concept further helps to create cognitive and self-regulatory strategies, which are directly reflected in the academic performance. We used the standardized questionnaire DAUS 1 by Hrbackova (2011) for this purpose. This questionnaire contains 40 items that respondents rate by a seven-point scale, from "1 - I totally disagree" to "7 - I fully agree," with 4 meaning "difficult to decide". Within the framework of academic self-concept, the results from this research show that more foreign than Czech doctoral students evaluate their metacognitive strategies higher. The respondents evaluate their self-efficacy rather on average, but all respondents see in their studies a high degree of meaningfulness corresponding to the expectations they have from the profession of university teachers.