Teachers View Students: an Attitude Assessment Through Personality Profiles

Abstract

The attitudes of 52 evening college faculty members at three state universities were obtained through their descriptions of an ideal college student and a typical adult evening college student on an adjective check list. Results were reported in terms of personality profiles of the two student types, and significant differences were found on 19 of the 22 experimental scales used for analysis of the data. These faculty members had a generally less favorable attitude toward adult students than they had toward their ideal conception of a college student. Therefore, the general purposes of the study were achieved. Faculty attitudes could be assessed by means of a personality inventory, which discriminated between relevant concepts, and some expected differences between these concepts were found. THE PROBLEMIn an earlier study (5), the author investigated relationships between adult evening college students' needs for autonomy and succorance and their orientations toward learning, their preferences for certain teaching methods and styles, the students' satisfaction with their teachers' methods and styles, and academic achievement. Results of the study indicated that, from the students' point of view, their teachers' personality characteristics-as manifested by their behavior in the classroom-were very important to the students' satisfaction and success in the course work. These classroom behaviors may also be considered as an index to the teacher's attitudes.The purpose of the present study was to attempt to discover the attitudes of evening college teachers toward their students more directly, in terms of the same Adjective Check List (ACL) personality inventory, that had been utilized in the prior study of students. Since attitudes are widely viewed as a generalizing and patterning mechanism of the mind, there seemed to be validity in seeking a general faculty attitude toward students.

Beyond Competencies: Associations between Personality and School Grades Are Largely Independent of Subject-Specific and General Cognitive Competencies

“…Second, the hypothesis that the competence-independent contributions of personality might reflect grading practices or halo effects should be tested. Here, teachers’ perceptions of the “ideal student” ( Kitchin 1972 ) or the incremental value of teachers’ reports on students’ personalities beyond the students’ self-reports seem particularly important ( Brandt et al 2021 ; Poropat 2014b ). Third, differential effects by gender should be explored in greater detail.…”

Spouses' perceptions of persons with aphasia

“…The Adjective Check List (ACL, Gough & Heilbrun, 1983) was employed by participants to describe the personality of their partner. This well known questionnaire has previously been employed to describe how mothers perceive their children (Scarr, 1969) and how teachers perceive their students (Kitchin, 1972). It consists of a list of 300 American-English adjectives arranged alphabetically (Gough & Heilbrun, 1983).…”