Dimensions of Teacher Beliefs about the Teaching Process

Abstract

One contemporary view among psychologists is that human beings form representations, or cognitive maps, of the external world which then serve as mediators for experiencing and responding to reality. Psychologists' investigations in the last decade or so have focussed on the formal properties of these representations-their concreteness or abstractness, openness-closedness, simplicity-complexity, and the like-but few have sought to delineate the substance of cognitive maps in a given domain. This article reports the results of a sequence of data analyses attempting to identify the principal dimensions of teachers' belief systems regarding the classroom teaching-learning process. It is not as though we were totally ignorant of teachers' views of the educative process. There is a long tradition of research on teacher attitudes, motivations, behavioral styles, and role perceptions that necessarily reveal something about the substance of belief systems. The Minnesota Teacher Attitude Inventory-MTAI (Cook, Leeds & Callis, 1951), for example, is designed to measure the extent to which the teacher views the educative process as one in which a state of harmonious relations with his pupils is maintained, characterized by mutual affection and sympathetic understanding. While the domain tapped by the MTAI is similar to the one defined for this study,* the design of the research de-