Assessing the stability of teacher behavior.

This study of the stability of teacher behavior over time is formulated through two major questions: (1) the behavior of an individual teacher consistent over time? and (2) Are individual differences among teachers consistent over time Regrettably, the first question has rarely been considered in previous investigations of the stability of teacher behavior, and empirical research on the second question has been marxed by considerable confusion. In this paper we develop statistical procedures for answering each of these questions. Approaches and methods of previous studies of temporal stability are reevaluated. In addition, methods for assessing the stability of teacher behavior across contexts are described. Observational data on classroom teachers are used throughout to illustrate our new approaches and methous for the stud:' of stability of behavior. ASSESSING THE STABILITY OF TEACHER BEHAVIOR' David Rogosa, Robert E. Floden, and John B. Willett 2 Questions About Stability Answers to the question, Is teacher behavior stable? have been sought by researchers for the past half-century. Despite the many extensive studies of teacher behavior, affirmative answers to this question have been rare. For example, Borich (1977) states, results of these studies suggest that teacher behavior may be unstable across long periods of time and content (p. 300) 3 . Moreover, researchers lack confidence in the results of these research efforts; the conclusi.m of Shavelson and Dempsey-Atwood (1976) that (a) most 'This research was supported primarily by a grant from the Program for Teaching and Instruction of the National Institute of Education, United States Department of Education. (Grant #NIE-G-81-0087) In addition, the work of the first and third authors was supported in part by grants from the Spencer Foundation; the work of the second author was supported in part by the Institute for Research on Teaching, College of Education, Michigan State University. 2 David Rogosa is an Assistant Professor at the Stanford University School of Education. Robert E. Floden is an IRT senior researcher and an MSU associate professor of teacher education and educational psychology. John B. Willett is a graduate student at the Stanford University School of Education. The authors wish to thank Donald Veldman of the University of Texas at Austin and Thomas Moon of California State College in Pennsylvania for providing them with the classroom observation data used in this paper. 3 The recent review by Darling-Hammond, Wise, and Pease (1983) summarizes the research on stability of teaching behavior as follows: bottom-line question is, Does a given teacher exhibit the same kinds of behavior at different points in time and within different teaching contexts? In general, the answer is 'no,' especially with regard to measures of specific, discrete teaching behaviors (p. 299).