Development and evaluation of a Chinese version of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI)

Abstract

Teacher-student interpersonal relationships play an important role in education. The Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) was designed to measure students' interpersonal perceptions of their teachers. There are two Chinese versions of the QTI for student use, and that inherited the weaknesses of the previous English versions, such as items that focus on class behaviour, instead of teacher behaviour, or that include conditionals and negations. The present study aimed to develop an improved Chinese version of the QTI which is conceptually parallel with the original QTI and with the use of optimal item wording. The process contained several steps, including expert panels and student and teacher interviews. New items were also created based on the Chinese secondary classroom context, rather than only using translations of English items. The final version of the Chinese version of the QTI presented in this paper was evaluated with a sample of 2000 students from 4 secondary schools in mainland China who rated a total of 80 teachers. The resulting version of the Chinese QTI had adequate validity and reliability, and it distinguished clearly between teachers. The predictive validity was supported by the relation between the students' perceptions of their teachers and their academic emotions in class. Although further improvement of the instrument is recommended, it can be used to study interpersonal teacher behaviour in China and to help to improve Chinese teachers' teaching practices.

Looking to relate: teacher gaze and culture in student-rated teacher interpersonal behaviour

“…What we now report further complements our previous work by relating teacher gaze to student ratings of teacher interpersonal behaviour for the first time. Not only is the present research the first to relate teacher gaze to a major dimension of secondary students' classroom experience (Eccles et al 1993), but we report the first use of circular statistics (Gurtman 2009) within educational science, in accordance with the circular structure of our framework for understanding teachers' interpersonal behaviour, namely the Teacher Interpersonal Circle (Sun et al 2018;Wubbels et al 2014).…”

Classroom Social Environment as Student Emotions' Antecedent: Mediating Role of Achievement Goals

“…Student perceptions of teacher agency and communion were measured using a Chinese version of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI; Sun, Mainhard, & Wubbels, 2018), which follows a circumplex structure and consists of 40 items. Example items are "This teacher threatens students with punishment" (i.e., low communion and high agency) or "This teacher is compliant" (i.e., high communion and low agency).…”

“…One possible explanation could be that a certain type of teacher dominance, such as providing structure in class by setting clear rules and conveying high expectations rather than strictly controlling behavior, is beneficial for student learning (Roorda, 2011). It also needs to be considered that in the Chinese context teacher strictness is valued in class (Sun et al, 2018;Wei et al, 2015).…”

Teacher–Student Interaction and Chinese Students’ Mathematics Learning Outcomes: The Mediation of Mathematics Achievement Emotions

“…On the other hand, student freedom interactions scored lower than teacher leadership in the present study. This may reveal some difficulties in creating a classroom environment characterized by student freedom [ 6 ]. As Wang pointed out, although the curriculum reforms in China emphasized student-centeredness, the drawbacks of being time-consuming, being unpredictable for the teacher, and the uncertainty about completing the required tasks impede the implementation of student-centeredness in classrooms [ 3 , 4 ].…”

“…Biggs even argued that both “teacher-centered” and “student-centered” approaches may exist simultaneously in Chinese mathematics classrooms “Teacher-centered approaches” refer to the teaching methods where teachers dominate and actively engage in teaching and classroom interactions in order to effectively transmit knowledge to students, while “student-centered approaches” put the responsibility of learning on the students and advocate that the students have the autonomy to choose the content of study and initiate classroom interactions [ 5 ]. Debunking the myth of Chinese learners and mathematics teachers’ interactional styles in classrooms has thus become an interesting topic [ 6 , 7 ].…”