The Relationship Among Iranian EFL Teachers’ Attributional Styles, Decision-Making Types, and Teaching Effectiveness: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

The study of attribution and decision-making is a process that involves improving people's beliefs in the causes of their failures and success to promote future motivation for achievement. It is nowadays widely accepted that decisive teaching and making use of attributional implications is a vital ingredient of a superb academic life. Accordingly, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between different dimensions of decision-making types, attributional styles, and teaching effectiveness among Iranian EFL teachers. Further, this study tried to explore the mediating role of decision-making types between attributional styles and teaching effectiveness. As the study participants, 146 adult male and female EFL teachers aged between 25 to 40 years old at different language institutes in several cities of Golestan province, Iran, were selected based on a purposive sampling method and were given three questionnaires. To analyze the data, structural equation modeling (SEM) was run by using the SmartPLS software, version 2. The obtained results showed significant relationships between different dimensions of attributional styles, decision-making types, and teaching effectiveness. The results indicated that decision-making types could successfully mediate between the dimensions of attributional styles and teaching effectiveness. Finally, the findings were discussed concerning the context of Iran. These findings would hopefully be advantageous for EFL teachers (English as a foreign language), SLTE courses (second language teacher education), and also TTC centers (teacher training course) to shape and empower different domains of teaching effectiveness by exploring teachers' decision-making types and attributional styles.