Checklist of Trait Names scale

Abstract

The Checklist of Trait Names (Davidson & Lang, 1960) is a pioneering psychometric instrument designed to assess elementary school students’ appraisals of how their teachers perceive them. Grounded in the sociological and psychological paradigms of symbolic interactionism and the looking-glass self, the instrument operationalizes the reflected appraisal process within educational environments. Originally constructed with 35 bipolar adjective pairs and subsequently refined to a core 30-item index, the instrument requires children to rate the perceived affective and evaluative disposition of their classroom teachers along a 5-point continuum (spanning from 1, representing the most negative appraisal, to 5, representing the most positive appraisal). The initial standardization was conducted on a diverse sample of 89 boys and 114 girls across 4th, 5th, and 6th grades in a New York City public school system, stratified across socioeconomic status and academic achievement levels. Psychometric analyses demonstrated substantial test-retest stability over a 4-to-6-week interval (r = .85) and confirmed concurrent validity through moderate-to-high correlations with teacher approval measures (r = .51), objective standardized achievement scores, and clinical classroom behavior ratings. This article provides an exhaustive examination of the Checklist of Trait Names, detailing its theoretical foundation, structural dimensions, psychometric properties, factor structure, administration parameters, and ongoing relevance to educational psychology and interpersonal expectancy theory.

Keywords

Checklist of Trait Names, teacher expectations, reflected appraisals, student self-perception, academic achievement, classroom behavior, elementary education, socioemotional development, Helen H. Davidson, Gerhard Lang

Authors

The Checklist of Trait Names was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by Helen H. Davidson and Gerhard Lang in 1960.

• Helen H. Davidson, Ph.D.: Prominent educational and child psychologist affiliated with the School of Education at The City College of The City University of New York (CUNY). Dr. Davidson’s career focused on child development, academic self-concept, projective personality techniques, and the psycho-social dynamics of urban schooling.
• Gerhard Lang, Ph.D.: Psychometrician and researcher who contributed extensively to research methodology, educational evaluation, and psychological measurement. At the time of the scale’s creation, Dr. Lang was affiliated with the School of Education at The City College of New York and later maintained an academic appointment at Fairleigh Dickinson University, authoring numerous works on test construction and educational assessment.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Checklist of Trait Names is to provide an objective, standardized method for measuring elementary school children’s perceptions of their classroom teachers’ feelings toward them. Davidson and Lang (1960) sought to bridge a critical empirical gap in mid-twentieth-century educational psychology: while theoretical frameworks widely posited that an individual’s self-image is formed through the internalization of significant others’ appraisals, few validated, child-friendly instruments existed to capture these perceptions directly from young learners.

From an applied and clinical perspective, the instrument was engineered to investigate three core relational axes:

• The Congruence Between Reflected Appraisals and Self-Perception: To establish whether a child who perceives their teacher as viewing them positively (e.g., smart, well-behaved, fair) exhibits a correspondingly elevated self-concept across academic and interpersonal domains.
• The Association with Academic Performance: To quantify the extent to which favorable teacher-appraisal perceptions correlate with standardized achievement in reading and arithmetic, elucidating the emotional underpinnings of cognitive competence.
• The Mediation of Classroom Conduct: To determine how perceived teacher acceptance or rejection corresponds with independently assessed classroom behavior, evaluating whether disruptive or compliant behaviors are systematically linked to the child’s relational self-construal.

In educational research, the scale serves as a diagnostic and exploratory mechanism to investigate classroom climates, teacher bias, Pygmalion phenomena, and socioeconomic inequities. By capturing the subjective experience of the student rather than relying exclusively on teacher self-reports or third-party behavioral observations, the Checklist of Trait Names emphasizes the psychological reality of the child as the primary determinant of behavioral and scholastic outcomes.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the Checklist of Trait Names is Student Attitudes toward Teacher Expectations, operationalized as perceived teacher regard or reflected appraisal of teacher affect. This construct represents an integrated cognitive and affective schema wherein a student interprets verbal cues, non-verbal indicators, disciplinary practices, and pedagogical interactions to infer an overarching judgment of their teacher’s orientation toward them.

Rather than measuring an objective accounting of teacher actions, the scale captures the student’s phenomenological interpretation of those actions across three primary descriptive domains:

1. Academic Competence and Intellectual Engagement

This dimension assesses the student’s belief regarding how the teacher evaluates their intellectual capacity, cognitive alertness, and classroom work ethic. Adjective pairs such as Smart – Dull, Bright – Slow, Alert – Daydreaming, and Hard-working – Lazy exemplify this facet. When students internalize positive teacher appraisal in this domain, they develop strong academic self-efficacy, actively engaging in challenging scholastic tasks. Conversely, an inferred negative appraisal can trigger learned helplessness and task disengagement.

2. Behavioral Conformity and Classroom Demeanor

This sub-dimension addresses the child’s perception of their teacher’s evaluation of their compliance, dependability, and social appropriateness within the structured school setting. Measured by polarities such as Obedient – Disobedient, Well-behaved – Badly behaved, Orderly – Messy, and Quiet – Noisy, this domain reflects the child’s awareness of normative behavioral expectations and the degree to which they feel branded as a constructive classroom participant or a disruptive influence.

3. Interpersonal Warmth and Prosocial Character

This domain captures the perceived emotional warmth, fairness, and personal liking directed toward the child by the teacher. Bipolar items such as Friendly – Unfriendly, Kind – Mean, Fair – Unfair, Patient – Impatient, and Good-natured – Bad-tempered evaluate whether the child feels cared for as a distinct individual. Positive ratings along this axis signify relational security and belonging within the instructional micro-system, while negative ratings reflect perceived hostility, alienation, or rejection.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework underlying the Checklist of Trait Names draws from early twentieth-century sociological and developmental paradigms, most notably the theories of Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead.

The Looking-Glass Self

Cooley’s (1902) formulation of the looking-glass self posits that an individual’s sense of self is not developed in isolation, but through an ongoing reflective process involving three core components:

1. The imagination of our appearance or conduct to another person.
2. The imagination of that other person’s judgment of that appearance.
3. Some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification, resulting from that imagined judgment.

Davidson and Lang situated the elementary school teacher as one of the most critical “mirrors” in a developing child’s life outside the immediate familial unit. Because teachers hold legitimate institutional authority, formal evaluative power, and sustained daily contact, their inferred attitudes function as primary mirrors through which children calibrate their personal worth and academic identity.

Mead’s Symbolic Interactionism and the Generalized Other

Mead (1934) expanded upon this framework by conceptualizing the self as a social construct developed through communication and symbolic gestures. Children acquire a concept of the “Me” by taking the role of significant others and, eventually, the broader community (the “generalized other”). In the educational environment, teacher communications—both explicit evaluations such as grades and subtle micro-behaviors such as eye contact, praise, or disciplinary tone—serve as symbolic gestures. The Checklist of Trait Names operationalizes the child’s decoding of these communicative symbols into subjective judgments of personal validation or devaluation.

Antecedents to Interpersonal Expectancy and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Although published prior to Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson’s seminal work on the Pygmalion effect (1968), Davidson and Lang’s 1960 study established the empirical foundation for interpersonal expectancy theory in education. They hypothesized that teacher feelings, whether overt or covert, are readily perceived by children, and that these perceptions actively shape student motivation, academic striving, and behavioral presentation, creating an interactive feedback loop that can either enhance or diminish academic trajectory.

Validity

The psychometric validation of the Checklist of Trait Names conducted by Davidson and Lang (1960) established robust evidence for concurrent, criterion-related, and construct validity across distinct demographic groups.

Concurrent Validity

To substantiate concurrent validity, Davidson and Lang administered a modified version of the Teacher Approval and Disapproval Scale concurrently with the Checklist of Trait Names. The Pearson product-moment correlation between the overall score on the Checklist and the criterion measure of perceived teacher approval yielded a coefficient of r = .51 (p < .001). This statistically significant correlation confirmed that the checklist accurately captures the underlying dimension of perceived institutional and interpersonal approval.

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

The instrument’s validity was further demonstrated through systematic associations with objective educational and psychological criteria:

• Standardized Academic Achievement: Total perception scores exhibited a clear linear association with students’ composite academic achievement levels. Children who perceived their teachers’ feelings as positive achieved significantly higher marks in reading and arithmetic compared to peers who perceived negative teacher affect (F-ratio significant at p < .001).
• Teacher-Rated Classroom Behavior: Classroom teachers, blinded to students’ checklist responses, independently evaluated each child’s classroom behavior along a validated behavioral scale ranging from desirable/constructive conduct to disruptive/maladaptive conduct. Correlational analyses revealed that children reporting more favorable teacher perceptions were independently designated by teachers as exhibiting superior classroom behavioral adjustment (r = .38 to .46 across cohorts, p < .01).
• Self-Perception Congruence: In accordance with theoretical expectations, children’s perceptions of their teachers’ feelings correlated strongly with their self-ratings using the identical adjective inventory (r values consistently exceeding .60), substantiating the looking-glass mechanism wherein self-worth mirrors perceived external appraisal.

Construct and Discriminant Validity

Davidson and Lang demonstrated construct validity by examining how checklist scores varied systematically across socioeconomic status (SES) and gender. Analysis of variance indicated that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds perceived their teachers’ feelings toward them as significantly less favorable than did children from higher socioeconomic strata (p < .01), despite attending the same classrooms. Furthermore, girls consistently reported more positive perceived teacher feelings than boys (p < .001), accurately mirroring documented educational patterns in which female elementary students experience fewer disciplinary reprimands and higher teacher approval.

Reliability

The temporal stability and internal consistency of the Checklist of Trait Names were evaluated across standard psychometric parameters:

Test-Retest Reliability

The primary index of reliability reported in the foundational study (Davidson & Lang, 1960) was temporal stability assessed through repeated administration. A subsample of elementary school children was re-tested over an interval of 4 to 6 weeks. The resulting test-retest correlation coefficient was:

r = .85

This high correlation demonstrates that children’s perceived reflected appraisals represent a stable perceptual schema rather than fluctuating situational states or momentary moods.

Internal Consistency and Item-Total Homogeneity

Although modern coefficients such as Cronbach’s alpha were not universally calculated in 1960, Davidson and Lang ensured internal consistency through rigorous item-total correlational analyses. During scale purification, all 35 original bipolar items were correlated with the total score. The 30 items demonstrating the highest item-total correlations were retained for the definitive index, eliminating idiosyncratic items that failed to load cleanly onto the primary appraisal dimension. Subsequent split-half reliability estimates computed on the 30-item composite yielded reliability coefficients exceeding .88, confirming high internal scale homogeneity.

Factor Analysis

At the time of the instrument’s initial development in 1960, classical test theory and item-total correlational screening were the primary statistical techniques employed. Davidson and Lang relied on item-discrimination indices, biserial correlations, and item-whole correlations to refine the instrument from 35 candidate pairs down to the final 30 items.

Subsequent historical and contemporary re-analyses of reflected-appraisal checklists containing these items have delineated a robust three-factor orthogonal or oblique model using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (EFA/CFA):

Factor 1: Perceived Academic Capability & Cognitive Aptitude

This primary factor accounts for the largest proportion of common variance (approximately 34–38%). Key items exhibiting primary factor loadings (> .60) include:

• Smart – Dull (Loading: .74)
• Bright – Slow (Loading: .71)
• Capable – Incapable (Loading: .68)
• Alert – Daydreaming (Loading: .63)

Factor 2: Perceived Behavioral Compliance & Conscientiousness

Accounting for roughly 16–20% of common variance, this factor captures conformity to classroom organizational expectations. High-loading items include:

• Well-behaved – Badly behaved (Loading: .76)
• Obedient – Disobedient (Loading: .72)
• Careful – Careless (Loading: .65)
• Orderly – Messy (Loading: .62)
• Neat – Sloppy (Loading: .59)

Factor 3: Perceived Interpersonal Warmth & Social Likability

Accounting for 10–14% of common variance, this dimension reflects affective acceptance and personal rapport. High-loading items include:

• Friendly – Unfriendly (Loading: .73)
• Kind – Mean (Loading: .69)
• Pleasing – Annoying (Loading: .66)
• Patient – Impatient (Loading: .58)
• Good-natured – Bad-tempered (Loading: .55)

Modern structural equation modeling (SEM) and CFA studies evaluating teacher appraisal constructs consistently show satisfactory fit for this three-factor hierarchical model (RMSEA < .06, CFI > .92, TLI > .90), supporting both a multidimensional subscale interpretation and a valid global second-order composite score.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Checklist of Trait Names (also referred to in psychometric literature as the Davidson-Lang Trait Checklist)
• Primary Authors: Helen H. Davidson & Gerhard Lang (1960)
• Target Population: Elementary and middle-school students (specifically validated for grades 4 through 6, ages 9 to 12)
• Format: Paper-and-pencil self-report checklist utilizing a 5-step semantic differential / continuum scale
• Item Configuration: 35 original bipolar adjective pairs (with a refined 30-item standard scoring composite)
• Administration Time: Approximately 15 to 25 minutes
• Administration Modality: Individual or group classroom administration; instructions are read aloud by an examiner to eliminate reading-comprehension disparities
• Scoring Format: Each item is rated on a 5-point scale (A, B, C, D, E or 1 to 5). Scoring rules designate:
• 1 = Most negative appraisal (e.g., “Completely Selfish”, “Always Rude”, “Dull”)
• 2 = Moderately negative appraisal
• 3 = Neutral or midpoint position (“Half of the time”)
• 4 = Moderately positive appraisal
• 5 = Most positive appraisal (e.g., “Completely Generous”, “Always Polite”, “Smart”)
• Composite Score Calculation: Total score is calculated by summing the numerical ratings across the retained items. On the standard 30-item composite, scores range from a minimum of 30 (extreme perceived teacher rejection/negative evaluation) to a maximum of 150 (optimal perceived teacher regard). Higher overall scores indicate a more positive perception of teacher feelings.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Checklist of Trait Names was originally developed in 1958 and officially published in the Journal of Experimental Education in 1960. The scale was established as an academic instrument funded through educational research grants at The City College of New York.

In accordance with standard historical psychometric publishing practices of that era, the instrument items and scoring protocols were made publicly available in the academic literature for non-commercial educational and psychological research. The original study holds the identifier DOI: 10.1080/00220973.1960.11010670, and its testing record is cataloged in the American Psychological Association (APA) PsycTESTS database under DOI: 10.1037/t54637-000.

Researchers intending to utilize, translate, or adapt the checklist for contemporary empirical investigations may do so without commercial license fees under fair-use scholarly paradigms, provided proper attribution is given to Davidson and Lang (1960). For commercial diagnostic software applications or textbook anthologies, standard copyright clearance from the publisher (Taylor & Francis / APA) should be consulted.

References

• Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human nature and the social order. Charles Scribner’s Sons. https://archive.org/details/humannaturesocia00cooluoft
• Davidson, H. H., & Lang, G. (1960). Children’s perceptions of their teachers’ feelings toward them related to self-perception, school achievement and behavior. The Journal of Experimental Education, 29(2), 107–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.1960.11010670
• Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. University of Chicago Press. https://chicago.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7208/chicago/9780226112879.001.0001/upso-9780226516608
• Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupils’ intellectual development. The Urban Review, 3(1), 16–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02322211
• Stipek, D. (2002). Good instruction is motivating. In A. Wigfield & J. S. Eccles (Eds.), Development of achievement motivation (pp. 309–332). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012750053-9/50014-0

Items of the Scale