Validation of an Elementary School Version of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction

This article is a report of the adaptation of the high school version of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction for use in elementary schools. Based on an eight-sector circumplex defined by the two axes of Dominance-Submission and Cooperation-Opposition, the questionnaire assesses interpersonal behavior of teachers and students for the eight dimensions of Leadership, Helping-Friendly, Understanding, Student Responsibility-Freedom, Uncertain, Dissatisfied, Admonishing, and Strict behavior. When the revised questionnaire was administered to 1,512 students in 39 fifth-grade classes of 13 randomly selected elementary schools in Singapore, each scale exhibited satisfactory internal consistency reliability and predictive validity for two levels of analysis (the student and the class mean) and differentiated between classes. Girls consistently rated the teachers' interpersonal behavior more favorably than did boys.