Revising the Teacher Beliefs Interview for Post-Secondary Instructors

Friday 11:15-11:45am PT / 12:15-12:45pm MT / 1:15-1:45pm CT / 2:15-2:45pm ET Online

Authors

Doug Czajka, Utah Valley University
LeeAnna Chapman, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Katherine Ryker, University of South Carolina-Columbia

Teaching beliefs represent a set of understandings that influence what instruction looks like in practice. They are difficult to elicit and individuals may have limited vocabulary to explain why they teach the way they do. Few instruments have been developed to capture teaching beliefs. Luft and Roehrig (2007) developed the Teacher Beliefs Interview (TBI) in order to elicit the teaching beliefs of secondary science teachers. The TBI includes seven open-ended questions with coding rubrics that position responses into one of five categories: traditional, instructive, transitional, responsive, and reform-based. Traditional and instructive categories are considered teacher-centered, while responsive and reform-based categories are student-centered. Student-centered responses indicate a view of science instruction as teaching "a dynamic field that is subject to revision" (Luft & Roehrig, 2007; p. 42).

We collected and coded more than 160 TBI interviews with post-secondary instructors. While coding these interviews, we noticed that this population frequently differs in how they respond to the seven TBI questions. This results in difficulties reliably coding responses, even among experienced TBI users. To address this, we re-analyzed 95 interviews conducted with post-secondary instructors using the original TBI rubrics. Initial Cronbach's alpha per question ranged from .609 to .905. Disagreements between reviewers were discussed to evaluate whether the source of disagreement was in the response, the coder, or the rubric. Exemplar quotes from agreed upon responses were collected. These discussions and exemplar responses using language from post-secondary instructors were incorporated into revised coding rubrics for each question. The authors then coded four randomly drawn interviews with the original and revised rubrics. The revised rubric improved reliability for experienced raters as measured using an intraclass correlation coefficient (.555 to .724). The revised TBI rubric can more reliably evaluate the teaching beliefs of post-secondary instructors, while maintaining the intent of the original rubric.