From leadership research to district action: Students’ perceptions of schools’ influence on the leadership self-efficacy of adolescent girls: religious and secular post-primary schools in Israel

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

The aim of this study is to evaluate the perceived effect post-primary school has on female teenagers’ leadership self-efficacy according to their own perceptions. The study employs social cognitive theory and focuses on the teenagers’ personal social experiences and perceptions regarding the way leadership is taught in their schools. The research is based on 26 in-depth interviews among teenage girls attending middle and high schools in the public education system in Israel. The teenage girls attend secular state education schools and religious all-girl state education schools (Ulpana). The findings indicate four major ways in which self-efficacy can be developed. The religious all-girl schools seem to promote leadership self-efficacy more effectively than secular mixed-gender schools, primarily by mastering leadership experiences, social modeling, and social persuasion of leadership ability.

Study methods

Educational research should be obligated to reveal the apparent and concealed processes in educational organizations in order to explain the formation of student identity and expose practices defining positions of power to certain groups. This is essential because education includes a combination of values and beliefs and the social construction of both the individual and society (Shalsky and Arieli, 2016). Youth leadership is also shaped by the social context within which it functions; therefore, a quantitative approach in general, and in-depth interviews in particular, is the ideal method to explore social construction. In-depth interviews are a means for a descriptive study that aims to comprehend the views and perspectives of informants in specific inquired circumstances (Brinkman, 2018). It is especially important when female subjects are concerned. As Dorothy E. Smith (1992) explained, referring to “women’s standpoint,” women act, see, and speak based on their experience as women. “At the root of in-depth interviewing is an interest in understanding the lived experience of other people and the meaning they make of that experience” (Seidman, 2006, p. 9). Therefore, this research uses a qualitative method, focusing on the meanings girls give to their leadership experiences at school.

Limitations

The findings were drawn from a rather small sample of interviewees. A larger sample size might have revealed more details about how leadership skills in the two research groups are developed. Moreover, an additional perspective from the point of view of the school leadership team and educators could have provided insights into their level of commitment to and understanding of the problem. The data collection was also done at a single point in time and focused on the Israeli case study in particular. Adolescent girls were the primary concern, and the study was created for a specific age range. In this regard, the results may be somewhat limited in terms of time and location, even though they reveal significant new findings.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Shenhav Perets; Nitza Davidovitch; Eyal Lewin. Students’ perceptions of schools’ influence on the leadership self-efficacy of adolescent girls: religious and secular post-primary schools in Israel. Frontiers in Psychology (2025-03-13). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1488270

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.