How Curriculum Intervention Enhances Pre-Service Early Childhood Music Teachers’ Teaching Self-Efficacy: A Conceptual Framework and Curriculum Design Grounded in Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory

Abstract

Pre-service early childhood music teachers frequently experience a pedagogical impasse characterized as being "able to play but unable to teach." This gap originates in the systemic disjunction between music-skill courses and music-pedagogy courses, which has long obscured the development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and the self-efficacy that accompanies it. Drawing on Bandura’s four-source theory of self-efficacy as an analytic framework, this paper delineates the construct of music teaching self-efficacy among pre-service early childhood teachers and examines its principal antecedents. It further advances a curriculum intervention logic anchored in mastery experience and orchestrated through the coordinated activation of all four efficacy sources, operationalized in a four-module curriculum scheme—Knowledge Reconstruction, Observation and Analysis, Progressive Simulation, and Authentic Practice—accompanied by a four-stage developmental model of self-efficacy. The central argument is that enhancing teaching self-efficacy depends less on expanding skill-training hours than on engineering sufficient low-risk opportunities for successful performance, reinforced by structured professional feedback and peer-based vicarious experiences, so that confidence migrates from the technical to the pedagogical domain. As a conceptual study, the proposed scheme and developmental model await empirical validation.