Abstract
Educational effectiveness research has proved the importance of teacher beliefs and attitudes for student learning. Beliefs strongly determine teachers' thoughts and actions and they ultimately influence student achievement, even though they might do so indirectly.
A change of beliefs is a necessary prerequisite for changing practices and behaviours. Studies of beliefs and attitudes are based on various concepts.
This study explores the concept of academic optimism and its functioning in the Czech education system. Academic optimism includes three important aspects of teachers' attitudes: self-efficacy, trust in students and their parents, and academic emphasis.
It is operationalised as a collective characteristic of the school staff and as an individual characteristic of each teacher. This study explores the functioning of both the collective and individual measures and aims at selecting the more appropriate one for studying the environment of Czech schools.
It also studies the relationship between academic optimism and student cognitive outcomes. The analyses are based on data from 39 basic schools, 325 lower secondary teachers, and 1316 grade 9 students collected in the Kalibro project in January 2016.
Confirmatory factor analysis indicated the functioning of both the collective and individual concepts in the Czech environment; however, the individual one seems to be more appropriate for Czech schools. Two-level structural equation modelling based on this limited sample of schools and students has not confirmed a relationship between academic optimism and mathematical achievement.
This relationship should be verified on a representative student sample using achievement tests that correspond better than the Kalibro test to the recent curricular norm.