Job satisfaction, psychological well-being, and movement facilitation self-efficacy among primary school classroom teachers

When children run, jump, and play, their bodies respond in remarkable ways. Physical activity triggers stronger hearts, sharper minds, and better coordination. Yet a new study suggests that how teachers feel about their jobs may shape how confidently they bring these benefits to their students.

The study behind these findings was conducted in Ankara, Türkiye, where researchers surveyed 320 primary school classroom teachers using a quantitative, cross-sectional correlational design. Classroom teachers, rather than specialized physical education instructors, were the focus because in many elementary school systems they are the staff primarily responsible for delivering physical education and games lessons to young children. This makes their confidence in facilitating movement a matter of practical significance for how much physical activity children actually accumulate during the school day.

Three validated instruments anchored the measurement approach. Job satisfaction was assessed with the Minnesota Job Satisfaction Scale, a long-established measure of workers’ evaluative appraisals of their professional experiences. Psychological well-being was captured using the short form of the Psychological Well-Being Scale, which reflects broader dimensions of optimal functioning such as positive emotions, purpose in life, and effective personal functioning. Movement facilitation self-efficacy was measured with the Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale for Providing Physical Activity in the Classroom, an instrument designed specifically to gauge teachers’ confidence in organizing and delivering physically active learning experiences rather than general teaching competence.

Before testing any relationships among these constructs, the researchers validated their measurement model through confirmatory factor analysis, establishing both convergent and discriminant validity. This step matters because it demonstrates that the three constructs, although related, are empirically distinguishable rather than redundant reflections of a single underlying disposition. Only after this psychometric groundwork was secured did the team proceed to the structural model, which was estimated using maximum likelihood estimation, the standard approach for structural equation modeling with continuous indicators.

The structural results painted a coherent picture. Job satisfaction showed a strong positive association with psychological well-being, with a standardized coefficient of 0.64, a relationship large enough to suggest that these two occupational resources travel together closely in teachers’ daily professional lives. Psychological well-being, in turn, was positively associated with movement facilitation self-efficacy at 0.39, and job satisfaction retained a direct positive association with self-efficacy at 0.27 even after accounting for the pathway through well-being. The persistence of this direct link indicates that satisfied teachers may feel more capable of facilitating movement partly through mechanisms beyond their moment-to-moment psychological functioning, such as greater willingness to invest effort in lesson planning or stronger beliefs about the value of active teaching.

Mediation testing relied on a bootstrap procedure with 5,000 resamples, a technique that builds confidence intervals empirically rather than assuming a particular sampling distribution. The indirect effect of job satisfaction on movement facilitation self-efficacy through psychological well-being was 0.25, with a 95 percent confidence interval spanning 0.17 to 0.34. Because this interval excludes zero, the indirect pathway can be considered statistically meaningful. Taken together, the full model accounted for 39 percent of the variance in movement facilitation self-efficacy, a substantial share for a psychological outcome measured in a real-world occupational population.

Placing these coefficients in context helps clarify their meaning. The association between job satisfaction and psychological well-being, at 0.64, falls within the range typically interpreted as strong in correlational research, while the pathways linking well-being and job satisfaction to self-efficacy are moderate in size. It is worth remembering that all estimates derive from a single point-in-time assessment, so the direction of influence cannot be established with certainty. It is plausible that satisfied and psychologically healthy teachers grow more confident in leading active lessons, but it is equally conceivable that teachers who feel effective in the gymnasium or classroom come to enjoy their work more and function better psychologically. Longitudinal and experimental designs would be needed to disentangle these possibilities.

The theoretical framing of the study draws on ideas from positive organizational psychology, which treats job satisfaction and psychological well-being as resources that help employees cope with demands, sustain motivation, and maintain performance over time. Within this perspective, satisfaction is not merely a pleasant byproduct of good working conditions but an active ingredient in professional functioning. Applied to physical education, the argument is that teaching movement is uniquely demanding work. Unlike most school subjects, physical education requires simultaneous management of instructional, behavioral, emotional, and physical demands, including continuous movement facilitation, embodied demonstration, regulation of classroom energy, and real-time behavioral management. Teachers who lack sufficient psychological and occupational resources may struggle to sustain these practices, regardless of their pedagogical knowledge.

This demand profile helps explain why the researchers focused on classroom teachers rather than specialists. Physical education teachers in dedicated roles face well-documented occupational challenges, including role strain, emotional labor, professional marginalization, and heavy instructional loads. Classroom teachers delivering physical education and games lessons encounter analogous pressures while also carrying responsibility for every other subject in the curriculum. If their occupational resources are depleted, movement-oriented teaching is likely to be among the first casualties, since it competes directly with literacy and numeracy instruction for limited time and energy.

The findings also connect to a broader international policy conversation. Organizations such as UNESCO have emphasized the strategic role of schools in counteracting the global decline in children’s physical activity levels through high-quality physical education programs. National curricula provide the framework for such programs, but the quality and intensity of children’s activity during lessons depend heavily on how individual teachers implement movement-oriented learning experiences. Teachers’ instructional decisions, classroom management strategies, motivational support, and capacity to organize physically active environments are all closely associated with how much moderate-to-vigorous physical activity students actually accumulate. This shifts attention from curriculum documents to the teacher-related factors that determine whether curricular intentions translate into active practice.

Previous scholarship has established that teachers’ professional competence, motivation, and job satisfaction relate to the quality of physical education instruction and to students’ participation in physical activity, and systematic reviews have documented growing research on teacher job satisfaction and psychological well-being in general. What has been comparatively rare, however, is research examining how these occupational resources function together within an integrated explanatory framework in physical education settings. Most prior studies treated job satisfaction and psychological well-being either as independent predictors or as isolated outcomes rather than modeling their joint operation. The present study addresses this gap by situating self-efficacy within the specific context of physical activity promotion, thereby integrating occupational well-being theory with school-based physical activity research.

The practical implications extend to teacher support policies and instructional capacity development. If job satisfaction and psychological well-being are meaningful correlates of teachers’ confidence in facilitating movement, then interventions aimed at improving working conditions, recognition, and psychological support for classroom teachers may have downstream benefits for children’s physical activity opportunities. School administrators might consider how workload distribution, professional development, and collegial support influence not only teacher retention but also the quality of physically active learning experiences. Conversely, professional development programs that focus solely on pedagogical techniques for physical education may underperform if the underlying occupational and psychological resources of participants remain depleted.

Several limitations qualify the interpretation of these results. The cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, and the sample was drawn from a single city, which may limit generalizability to other regions or educational systems with different curricular structures and working conditions. Self-report measures introduce the possibility of common method variance, since the same individuals provided data on all constructs. Additionally, the study examined associations rather than observed teaching behaviors, so the link between self-efficacy and actual movement facilitation in lessons remains an inference grounded in prior literature rather than a direct observation within this dataset.

Nevertheless, the study offers a useful empirical bridge between two research traditions that have often operated separately: occupational health psychology, with its focus on employee well-being and satisfaction, and school-based physical activity research, with its focus on instructional quality and children’s activity levels. By demonstrating that a substantial portion of variance in movement facilitation self-efficacy is statistically accounted for by occupational and psychological resources, the findings suggest that efforts to promote children’s physical activity through schools may be more effective when they attend to the teachers themselves, not only to curricula, facilities, or pedagogical methods. Future research could extend this work with longitudinal designs, behavioral observations of lessons, and samples from diverse educational contexts to test whether the observed pathways hold over time and across settings.

Subject of Research: Job satisfaction, psychological well-being, and movement facilitation self-efficacy among primary school classroom teachers

Article Title: Job satisfaction, psychological well-being, and movement facilitation self-efficacy among primary school classroom teachers

Article References: Çeviker, A. P., Karakaya, M., Özoğlu, F., Aksoy, Y., Tutal, V., Dağdeviren, G., Şimşek, H., Chang, J., Lei, Z., & Tang, Q. (2026). Job satisfaction, psychological well-being, and movement facilitation self-efficacy among primary school classroom teachers. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1900901. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1900901

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1900901

Keywords: teacher wellbeing, physical education, job satisfaction, self-efficacy, child health, satisfaction, psychological, well-being, movement, facilitation, primary, school