An Inverted Factor Analysis Study of Student-Rated Introductory Psychology Instructors

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THE PROBLEM of defining the important and relevant characteristics of teachers has a long and somewhat fruitless history. Many at tempts have been made to isolate the essential differences between effective and ineffective tea chers, typically for the future construction of selection instruments. Autobiographies of gen erally recognized great teachers, descriptions written by students about their best-remembered teachers, quantitative test records of good and poor teachers, and a host of other devices have been used. This has been a particularly import ant problem in the selection of elementary and secondary school teachers as Beecher's recent review indicates (1). None of the attempts has proven very fruitful. Schools of education still depend today on the personal evaluation of pros pective teachers by more or less experienced in terviewers. Little attention has been devoted to the char acteristics of college teachers in contrast to the mass of research on elementary and secondary school levels. A recent government report (7) suggests that the main objectives in the training of college teachers is the development of com petent scholars and research workers and that little attention is paid to the development of teach ing skills. One method of defining important teaching characteristics may prove to be the so-called inverted factor or Q-technique of factor analysis. A series of quantitative measurements on a group of teachers may be inter cor related and the re sulting matrix of correlations factor analyzed to derive a set of independent factors that can ade quately describe the intercorrelations between the teachers. Behavorial descriptions of these factors may then help us in devising independent predictive measures of these important teaching variables. The present study was concerned with the ap plication of inverted factor analysis techniques to a large group of student ratings of introductory psychology instructors. It has been previously shown that student ratings can reflect individual differences between instructors (3). Whether from these same ratings significant and independ ! ent constellations of teaching behaviors can be determined was investigated in this research.