Introduction

In 2009, Robert M. Klassen, Rosemary Y. Foster, Sukaina Rajani and Carley Bowman published their article on examination of teachers job beliefs in the Yukon Territory in northern Kanada. This article, Teaching in the Yukon: Exploring teachers efficacy beliefs, stress and job satisfaction in a remote setting, written by the Robert M. Klassen, Rosemary Y. Foster, Sukaina Rajani and Carley Bowman. The author presents a mixed methods examination to examine how geographical, community and cultural factors related to teachers job beliefs in Yukon. The author believes that physical and human geography, level of connection with the community and cultural transitions influence job stress and job satisfaction among the teachers. My overall impression is that the authors have developed the concept of teachers working lives influenced by cultural and community factors.

Researchers, in their paper aimed primarily to see the relationship between the stated factors with job satisfaction and job stress among teachers in remote area. It is based on a study involving 221 teachers from the Yukon and western Canada. They are comparing teachers motivation in two settings, teachers in Yukon (remote area) as subjects and western Canadians as control group. They using mixed method approach, where, first they distributed questionnaires, then they conducted interviews with 20 teachers to elaborate more and provide deeper analysis on teachers self-efficacy, teachers collective efficacy, job satisfaction and job stress for teachers in the Yukon, compared to comparison group of teachers in urban area in Western Canada.

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Researchers explore factors that cause teachers job stress, which are workload and students misbehavior. They also found that, teachers with high level of self-efficacy cope better with challenging conditions, have good communication among staff, strong sense of collegiality, lower level of stress, higher level of commitment longterm job-commitment. In contrast, teachers with low levels of self-efficacy face some problems or difficulties with students behavior in classroom and school level, pessimistic about student learning and experience lower level of job satisfaction. In this paper, I will review the journal and present comments about the issues above, identify some relevant changes or additional information about the research area and finally suggest other ideas and areas where additional research findings would assist in understanding factors that may affect job stress and job satisfaction among teachers, in regard to the issues raised.

Critical Reflections

Researchers described recent (at the time of publication) research findings that indicated: teachers in remote areas face challenges in geographical, connection with the community and cultural transitions. They clearly stated their aims of conducting the study. Their first objective was to compare levels and patterns of self-efficacy, job stress and its sources, and job satisfaction. The second aim was to examine how geographical and social factors influence job stress and job satisfaction.

In the introduction, they clearly stated the significant of this study with clear statements and define terms used in their study contextually. The key terms defined
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phrase by phrase and they come with clear examples. The problem statement, objectives, theories and definition presented give clear picture about the subjects, settings and methods used to gather and analyze the data in this study. The researchers, in their literature review referred to some resources that gave clear pictures about the situations in remote area and urban area. They also review some material about job stress and job satisfaction among teachers and presented some ideas that can best help readers to understand this study. In depth, they also presented some findings from other researches regarding the issues of teachers motivation, self- and collective 3efficacy and job related beliefs.

In this article, the author has relied on some statements on why teaching becomes a stressful occupation. They relate the job stress with demand from administrators, colleagues, and students. Besides that, teachers are compounded by a lot of works, lack of recognition, shifting policies and so on. The author contends that physical and human geographical context influenced job stress and satisfaction among the teachers. Among the influence of geography discussed in this study included seasonal effect, availability of resources, restricted access to professional development, physical remoteness, social isolation and access to the land. They also focused on how job satisfaction critically influenced by community relationships, related to experience with the remote area, social isolation, stress and coping, job satisfaction, external relationships with parents and community members, social flexibility, and cultural/community practices.

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Design and Procedures

As I mention before, in conducting this study, the researchers used mixed method approach. They conducted their survey to the participants (107 teachers) from Yukon, who was attending teachers conventions. It was an adequate survey because the participants were teachers from elementary and secondary schools in Yukon. The comparison group was from a large number of teachers participating in a mandatory teacher convention. This is a replica study to see the positive relationship between factors that affect job stress and job satisfaction among teachers especially in remote settings.

Besides conducting survey study among the target group and the comparison group, they also conducted personal interview and the procedures were carefully planned and structured. Though lacking in the assessment instrument they did not mention whether they conducted the pilot study to check the validity and adequate questions used in gathering the data. It is very important to set a pilot study because a pilot study can reveal deficiencies in the design of a proposed experiment or procedure and these can then be addressed before time and resources are expended on large scale studies. As the purpose of a pilot study is to assess the feasibility of an experiment it is very rarely sensible to present more than summary statistics of the data. In fact, the data might be irrelevant if problems with the methods are discovered.

The study can be further extended to a larger scale research, or to other countries and in all educational institutions sectors including private and government
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educational sector to see the effect of certain settings or areas towards the effectiveness of teachers by knowing their job stress and job satisfactions. This study also can be further extended to countries that do not have big differences between remote areas and urban areas, to see whether geographical, social factors and culture factors influenced teachers job stress and job satisfaction in those areas.

Data Analysis and Presentation

In analyzing the data of the study, researchers used constant comparative method of content analysis that included deductive and inductive coding procedures. It is very important to analyze the qualitative data. They independently organize and coded the data, then developed a set of further codes. The further code emerged through multiple reading and coding the interview data. The qualitative data were presented in Table 4, where they divide under three columns, code, description and code frequency and endorsement. The frequencies were used to protect against bias, to verify our hypotheses about relationships among variables, and to keep the researchers analytically honest (Miles & Hubberman, 1994). From the codes and themes identified, they came out with a figure, Map of relationship between codes and themes, showing the relationship between the variables clearly.

For quantitative method, they analyzed data by looking at the item content, means and standard deviation to examine the bivariate correlations among the variables. Then, they used logistic regression to illustrate how teachers with low and high job stress distinguished reliably. They presented the data three different tables, which

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present certain items that show there was multiple regression conducted to examine the correlation between the variables.

Conclusion

My overall impression is that the authors presented their ideas clearly by writing each part under certain subheadings which could give early pictures on what is the part of article all about. I think it is an important subject since it provides vast knowledge about factors that affecting the effectiveness of teachers in delivering knowledge. In conclusion, in this paper Robert, Rosemary, Sukaina and Carley develop the idea of factors that affect the effectiveness, job stress and job satisfaction among teachers in the remote area, in Yukon. This publication

addresses an important problem in the field of motivation and what need to be considered when we are asked to serve in remote area, with limited facilities, living together with community from different culture and norms.

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References

http://tlu.fbe.unimelb.edu.au/pdfs/helpsheets/text_types/critical%20reviews.pdf

http://www.lc.unsw.edu.au/onlib/pdf/critical_review.pdf

http://wwwdocs.fce.unsw.edu.au/fce/EDU/eduwritingcritreview.pdf

http://studentsuccess.asu.edu/files/shared/tempe/tipsheets/Annotated%20Bibliograp hy.doc

http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~jnichols/Anobib.doc

http://www.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/82742/annotate.pdf

http://lgdata.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/docs/295/167554/How_to_ Annotate_a_Bibliography.pdf

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