Investigating the level of generic skills and the level of job performance among STEM teachers in Malaysia: A study to improve the quality of STEM teachers

Abstract

In today’s world, education is the most important element one needs to be able to meet with challenges that come with globalization. To be able to cope with the challenges, it is an essential that learners are equipped with several skills such as generic skills so that these skills would help them in their working environment. Unfortunately, the use of generic skills is lacking among Malaysian teachers which is resulting in low quality of teaching activities. As such, this study intends to investigate the level of generic skills and self-efficacy of STEM teachers in secondary schools in Malaysia and to look at their level of performance in schools. The correlational study adopted a quantitative approach. The empirical data of 382 teachers were analyzed using the Smart Partial Least Squares. The findings show that there is a high level of generic skills and level of job performance among STEM teachers in Malaysia. This study increases the treasures of knowledge in the educational environment and other fields such as social sciences, methodology and psychology. The findings indicate an effort towards finding ways to improve contextual performance among STEM teachers, through high generic skills. Although the findings of this study have led to the proving that self-efficacy fails to act as a mediator, research is still required from other researchers in the future through the position of other variables.