Instructional Media Use, Teacher Competence, and Principal Performance as Predictors of Elementary Teacher Performance: Evidence from Indonesia

Abstract

Teacher performance is widely regarded as one of the most decisive school-level factors in learning quality, yet elementary schools in many developing-country systems continue to report inconsistent instructional media use, uneven teacher competence, and variable school leadership, prompting renewed attention to the factors that jointly sustain effective teaching. This study tested whether instructional media use, teacher competence, and principal performance jointly and individually predict elementary teachers' job performance. Using an ex post facto, associative quantitative design, data were collected via Likert-scale questionnaires from all 24 teachers (saturated sampling) at a public elementary school and analyzed with multiple linear regression in IBM SPSS Statistics 26. All three predictors significantly and positively predicted teacher performance: instructional media use (B = 0.735, t = 3.550, p = .002, standardized beta = .471), teacher competence (B = 0.393, t = 2.475, p = .022, standardized beta = .312), and principal performance (B = 0.316, t = 2.597, p = .017, standardized beta = .246). Instructional media use was the dominant predictor by both criteria. Together, the three variables significantly predicted teacher performance, F(3, 20) = 90.887, p < .001, explaining 93.2% of its variance (R-squared = .932; adjusted R-squared = .921). Diagnostic testing confirmed normally distributed residuals, no multicollinearity (tolerance > .19, VIF < 5.2 for all predictors), and no heteroscedasticity. The findings suggest that sustaining elementary teachers' job performance depends jointly on classroom-level resources, individual competence, and school leadership, with implications for teacher-development policy in comparable elementary school systems.