Teacher Interaction in Primary School

Abstract

Since the 2000s, there has been an increasing focus on the development and emergence of tools that students can use to evaluate their teacher’s performance. One of these tools is the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) developed by Wubbels et al. (1987), which is based on Leary’s (1957) functional theory and methodology for personality evaluation. The QTI makes the description of the teacher’s activity possible from the perspective of student assessment. Wubbels et al. (1987) provided eight personality variables of interpersonal behavior. In the current research, the 48-item-long Hungarian language version of the QTI questionnaire developed by Wubbels et al. (1987), revised by Tóth & Horváth (2022) was applied. The questionnaire was utilized to collect data from elementary school students. The research involved 48 Hungarian elementary school students, and the reliability of the QTI ranged between 0.653 and 0.769. We examined the mean and standard deviation of the samples and subsamples. To compare the means, we used the Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests, as well as the ANOVA test. A cluster analysis was also performed for the SRE and STR dimensions. The research results show that the teacher interactions are characterized by low levels of uncertain, admonishing, and dissatisfied attitudes, while high-level teacher interaction was assumed as leading, consensus-seeking and helpful-friendly attitudes. It could be concluded that the highest variance was observed in the dimensions of strictness and forcefulness.