The Problems in Schools Questionnaire (PIS)

Abstract

The Problems in Schools Questionnaire (PIS) is a seminal psychometric instrument designed to assess adult orientations toward control versus autonomy support in educational interactions with children. Developed by Edward L. Deci, Allan J. Schwartz, Louise Sheinman, and Richard M. Ryan in 1981, the instrument operationalizes the core tenets of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) within pedagogical contexts. The PIS comprises eight realistic vignettes depicting typical classroom and home behavioral, academic, or social difficulties. Each vignette is followed by four distinct response alternatives corresponding to four regulatory styles: Highly Controlling (HC), Moderately Controlling (MC), Moderately Autonomous (MA), and Highly Autonomous (HA). Respondents evaluate all 32 items using a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“very inappropriate”) to 7 (“very appropriate”). Psychometric evaluations demonstrate sound internal consistency, robust temporal stability across test-retest intervals (r = .70 to .80), and profound construct, convergent, and predictive validity. Elevated autonomy-supportive scores on the PIS systematically correlate with enhanced student intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, perceived academic competence, and conceptual learning, whereas teacher controlling orientations reliably predict student amotivation, anxiety, and school disengagement. This article provides a comprehensive psychometric review of the PIS, detailing its theoretical foundation, structural validity, scoring algorithms, and empirical utility in educational psychology and pedagogical interventions.

Keywords

Problems in Schools Questionnaire, Self-Determination Theory, Autonomy Support, Controlling Orientation, Intrinsic Motivation, Perceived Competence, Teacher Motivating Style, Psychometrics, Vignette Methodology, Classroom Climate

Authors

The Problems in Schools Questionnaire was developed by a team of prominent psychological researchers at the University of Rochester:

• Edward L. Deci, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Rochester; Co-founder of Self-Determination Theory.
• Allan J. Schwartz, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Rochester Counseling and Mental Health Services.
• Louise Sheinman, Ph.D. — Clinical and Educational Psychologist, University of Rochester.
• Richard M. Ryan, Ph.D. — Research Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester and Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Catholic University; Co-founder of Self-Determination Theory.

Correspondence regarding the instrument’s historical development and theoretical architecture is maintained through the Center for Self-Determination Theory (CSDT).

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Problems in Schools Questionnaire is to quantitatively capture the interpersonal motivating styles that teachers, parents, and educators adopt when resolving student difficulties in educational environments. In traditional educational research, instructional methodology was frequently conceptualized through narrow operational categories such as direct instruction versus open classrooms. The PIS was established to pivot psychological inquiry away from superficial structural pedagogical forms and toward the underlying functional significance of interpersonal motivational climates.

At its core, the instrument assesses whether an adult tends to support children’s personal initiative, internal volition, and autonomous self-regulation, or conversely, tends to pressure, coerce, control, and manipulate children through extrinsic contingencies and evaluative comparisons. The scale addresses critical educational challenges, including academic underperformance, classroom misbehavior, social isolation, rule violations, and peer conflicts. By assessing adult responses across these multifaceted scenarios, the PIS serves several distinct clinical, diagnostic, and empirical functions:

• Educational Research: Investigating the systemic antecedents and consequences of classroom motivational climates on student achievement, intrinsic engagement, well-being, and drop-out intentions.
• Teacher Professional Development: Serving as a pre- and post-intervention diagnostic tool to measure behavioral transformation following training programs centered on autonomy-supportive teaching strategies (e.g., Johnmarshall Reeve‘s autonomy-support interventions).
• School Psychology & Counseling: Providing clinical consultants with a structured framework to evaluate how institutional pressures, administrative control, and high-stakes standardized testing impact educators’ instructional behaviors.
• Parental Orientation Assessment: Measuring parenting styles in relation to academic socialization, facilitating cross-contextual comparisons between home and school motivational orientations.

The instrument provides both distinct subscale profiles across four regulatory modalities and a composite Autonomy-Support Index, affording researchers extraordinary analytical flexibility across both person-centered and variable-centered methodological paradigms.

Psychological Construct

The construct assessed by the Problems in Schools Questionnaire is the adult’s interpersonal motivating style along the continuum of autonomy support versus control. Self-Determination Theory postulates that motivating styles are not arbitrary behavioral patterns but reflect deeply ingrained orientations regarding human agency, behavior change, and relational power. The PIS differentiates this continuum into four precisely articulated sub-dimensions:

1. Highly Controlling (HC)

The Highly Controlling style represents an authoritarian, coercive, and pressure-inducing approach to student regulation. Adults exhibiting high HC ratings rely heavily on explicit power assertion, punitive sanctions, enforced compliance, and behavioral mandate. The underlying assumption is that children are intrinsically disinclined toward productive action and require top-down enforcement to conform to institutional expectations. In HC approaches, the adult does not acknowledge the child’s perspective, invalidates negative affect, and uses guilt-inducing or commanding language. For instance, in Item 3, the teacher’s response to an unmotivated student is to “Make him stay after school until that day’s assignments are done,” and in Item 27, a parent resolves a behavioral infraction by deciding to “Give him a good scolding; stealing is something which cannot be tolerated and he has to learn that.”

2. Moderately Controlling (MC)

The Moderately Controlling style attempts to govern child behavior through instrumental extrinsic incentives, social comparisons, and conditional positive regard. Unlike the overt punishment characteristic of HC, MC relies on behaviorist reinforcement schedules, normative grading, competitive spelling bees, point charts, and contingent tangible rewards. Although superficially perceived as positive and supportive, MC strategies remain functionally controlling because they shift the child’s perceived locus of causality from internal to external. Behavior becomes instrumentalized: tasks are pursued exclusively to acquire praise, money, privileges, or superior status over peers. Exemplars include Item 5 (“Increase her allowance and promise her a ten-speed if she continues to improve”) and Item 4 (“Let him see how he compares with the other children in terms of his assignments and encourage him to catch up with the others”).

3. Moderately Autonomous (MA)

The Moderately Autonomous orientation seeks to foster the child’s internalization of values and behavioral standards by emphasizing self-monitoring, structured reflection, and personal effort. While acknowledging the importance of social integration and institutional norms, MA approaches prioritize the child’s own understanding of why certain behaviors are necessary. However, MA retains a moderately prescriptive undertone by projecting the adult’s moral reasoning onto the child rather than fully opening the floor to the child’s internal perspective. Representative items include Item 1 (“She should impress upon him the importance of finishing his assignments since he needs to learn this material for his own good”) and Item 25 (“Talk to him about the consequences of stealing and what it would mean in relation to the other kids”).

4. Highly Autonomous (HA)

The Highly Autonomous style is characterized by comprehensive perspective-taking, active listening, facilitation of personal problem-solving, emotional attunement, and student self-initiation. An HA adult views the child as an inherently active, growth-oriented organism whose challenging behaviors indicate underlying impediments to basic psychological need satisfaction. Rather than issuing unilateral decrees or manipulating rewards, the HA adult provides explanatory rationales, invites self-reflection, validates internal feelings, and co-creates collaborative solutions. In Item 2, the teacher decides to “Let him know that he doesn’t have to finish all of his work now and see if she can help him work out the cause of the listlessness,” and in Item 23, the educator chooses to “Invite her to talk about her relations with the other kids, and encourage her to take small steps when she’s ready.”

Theoretical Framework

The Problems in Schools Questionnaire is conceptually anchored in Self-Determination Theory (SDT), specifically utilizing the theoretical sub-theories of Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) and Organismic Integration Theory (OIT) formulated by Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan. SDT conceptualizes human beings as active, growth-oriented organisms with an innate propensity toward psychological integration, intellectual curiosity, and self-actualization. However, this optimal development is not automatic; it requires sustained environmental nutriments in the form of three universal basic psychological needs:

• Autonomy: The experience of self-endorsement, volition, and ownership over one’s actions, feeling that one is the author of one’s life.
• Competence: The experience of effectiveness, mastery, and capacity to exercise and expand one’s capabilities within challenging environments.
• Relatedness: The experience of belonging, mutual care, social connectedness, and feeling valued by significant others.

According to Cognitive Evaluation Theory, interpersonal environments can be either informational or controlling. When instructional interactions are controlling, individuals perceive the functional significance of the interaction as an attempt to coerce them into acting, thinking, or feeling in specified ways. This external pressure undermines the basic need for autonomy, shifts the perceived locus of causality from internal to external, and diminishes intrinsic motivation. Conversely, when an interaction is informational, it communicates competence-relevant feedback within a context of choice, non-judgmental acceptance, and interpersonal warmth, thereby cultivating intrinsic engagement and autonomous self-regulation.

Organismic Integration Theory further clarifies how non-intrinsically interesting behaviors (such as academic homework, classroom behavioral rules, and routine chores) become integrated into the self. OIT posits a continuum of extrinsic motivation ranging from external regulation (compliance via rewards/punishments) to introjection (internal pressure via guilt, ego-involvement, and anxiety), to identification (conscious valuing of the activity), and finally to integration (congruence with core self-values). The PIS was engineered specifically to assess the degree to which an adult’s socialization practices facilitate fully integrated autonomous regulation versus entrenching external and introjected forms of control.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Problems in Schools Questionnaire has been established across extensive empirical investigations conducted in diverse educational contexts. In their seminal 1981 validation study, Deci, Schwartz, Sheinman, and Ryan administered the PIS to elementary school teachers and prospectively tracked their fourth-through-sixth-grade students across an entire academic school year.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the distinct simplex pattern among the four subscales, where adjacent regulatory styles on the theoretical continuum correlate more positively with one another than non-adjacent styles. Specifically, the Highly Autonomous subscale correlates positively with Moderately Autonomous (r ≈ .35 to .45) and correlates negatively with Highly Controlling (r ≈ -.38 to -.52). This simplex matrix confirms that the PIS measures an underlying continuum of self-determination rather than disconnected behavioral traits.

Convergent validity has been established by correlating PIS scores with established psychological indices of teacher personality and instructional beliefs. Teachers scoring high on autonomy support show significant positive correlations with humanistic educational philosophies, pupil-control ideology favoring humanism over custodial control, and high interpersonal empathy. Conversely, controlling scores correlate substantially with authoritarianism, rigid dogmatism, and performance-oriented teaching philosophies.

Predictive and Ecological Criterion Validity

The ecological and predictive validity of the PIS is particularly robust. Deci et al. (1981) demonstrated that within two months of the academic year, children taught by teachers who scored high on autonomy support displayed significantly higher levels of intrinsic motivation (measured via the Children’s Academic Intrinsic Motivation Inventory), elevated self-esteem, and higher perceived academic competence compared to students assigned to controlling teachers. Furthermore, Reeve, Bolt, and Cai (1999) documented strong ecological validity by comparing teachers’ self-reported PIS autonomy-support scores against blind objective behavioral coding of their actual classroom instructional interactions. Teachers classified as autonomy-supportive via the PIS were observed to spend significantly more time listening, allowed students to work at their own pace, offered meaningful rationales for requested tasks, used non-controlling language, and asked significantly more open-ended questions than teachers classified as controlling.

Reliability

The Problems in Schools Questionnaire demonstrates strong psychometric reliability across internal consistency and temporal stability metrics, particularly when evaluated via composite scoring formulations.

Internal Consistency

Because each subscale consists of eight items reflecting diverse classroom scenarios, individual subscale Cronbach’s alpha coefficients reflect modest to moderate internal consistency, which is standard for vignette-based, multidimensional behavioral scales:

• Highly Autonomous (HA): α = .70 to .76
• Moderately Autonomous (MA): α = .63 to .70
• Moderately Controlling (MC): α = .65 to .72
• Highly Controlling (HC): α = .73 to .80

When the four subscale scores are mathematically synthesized into the overall composite Autonomy-Support Index (calculated using weighted linear contrast coefficients: (2 × HA) + (1 × MA) - (1 × MC) - (2 × HC)), the composite reliability achieves an outstanding internal consistency coefficient typically ranging from α = .80 to .86. This confirms that the aggregated instrument possesses high measurement precision for structural equation modeling and comparative regression analyses.

Test-Retest Temporal Stability

Temporal stability evaluations demonstrate that adult interpersonal motivating styles represent relatively enduring dispositions across time when educational conditions remain unchanged. In the original test-retest investigations by Deci et al. (1981) over a two-month interval, stability coefficients for the four subscales were:

• Highly Autonomous: r = .80
• Moderately Autonomous: r = .71
• Moderately Controlling: r = .76
• Highly Controlling: r = .78
• Overall Composite Autonomy-Support Index: r = .83

These values demonstrate excellent reproducibility and ensure that empirical shifts in PIS scores following structured pedagogical training interventions reflect true theoretical development rather than stochastic measurement error.

Factor Analysis

Structural evaluations of the Problems in Schools Questionnaire via Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) validate the theoretical quadripartite continuum postulated by Self-Determination Theory.

Exploratory Factor Structure

Early principal axis factoring with oblimin and varimax rotations revealed that items systematically load onto their designated theoretical dimensions rather than clustering by vignette narrative content. Factor loadings for individual items onto their respective primary dimensions generally exceed .40, with target loadings clustering between .45 and .74. Cross-loadings on divergent dimensions remain minimal, providing robust empirical verification of structural independence.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis & Model Fit

Subsequent psychometric testing utilizing Confirmatory Factor Analysis has evaluated the structural validity of competing models. CFA demonstrates that a four-factor correlated model (representing HC, MC, MA, and HA) consistently outperforms unidimensional or two-factor models (controlling versus autonomous). Typical fit indices reported across contemporary structural modeling studies include:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .91 to .94
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .90 to .93
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .045 to .058 (90% CI [.040, .064])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .051 to .062

Furthermore, structural equation modeling validates a quasi-simplex correlation pattern across latent factors: the latent correlation between HA and MA is moderately positive (φ ≈ .42), the correlation between MA and MC is weakly negative to orthogonal (φ ≈ -.12), and the correlation between HA and HC is strongly inverse (φ ≈ -.58). This ordered simplex structure provides rigorous mathematical verification that the PIS operationalizes a continuous underlying continuum of self-determination.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Assessment Type: Situational Judgment Vignette Questionnaire / Self-Report Motivating Style Assessment.
• Respondent Target: School teachers, pedagogical staff, school administrators, educational psychologists, and parents.
• Vignette Count: 8 standardized clinical/school vignettes depicting authentic educational and behavioral situations.
• Item Count: 32 total items (4 response options per vignette).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type rating scale:
  • 1 = Very inappropriate
  • 2 = Inappropriate
  • 3 = Moderately inappropriate
  • 4 = Neutral / Uncertain
  • 5 = Moderately appropriate
  • 6 = Appropriate
  • 7 = Very appropriate
• Subscale Item Distribution:
  • Highly Controlling (HC): Items 3, 8, 10, 16, 18, 21, 27, 31 (8 items)
  • Moderately Controlling (MC): Items 4, 5, 11, 14, 17, 24, 28, 32 (8 items)
  • Moderately Autonomous (MA): Items 1, 6, 9, 15, 19, 22, 25, 30 (8 items)
  • Highly Autonomous (HA): Items 2, 7, 12, 13, 20, 23, 26, 29 (8 items)
• Scoring Algorithms:
  • Subscale Means: Calculate the average score for each subscale by summing its 8 constituent items and dividing by 8: Mean(HC), Mean(MC), Mean(MA), and Mean(HA).
  • Autonomy-Support Index (ASI): Compute an overall relative autonomy composite using theoretical simplex contrast weights:
    
    ASI = (2 × HA) + (1 × MA) - (1 × MC) - (2 × HC)
    
    Higher positive ASI values reflect a dominant autonomy-supportive orientation, whereas negative values signify an overriding controlling orientation.
• Administration Time: Approximately 15 to 20 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Problems in Schools Questionnaire was formally published in 1981 by Edward L. Deci, Allan J. Schwartz, Louise Sheinman, and Richard M. Ryan in the Journal of Educational Psychology. The instrument is open-access for academic, non-commercial research, and educational instructional purposes. The copyright resides with the original authors and the Center for Self-Determination Theory. In accordance with open-science practices established by SDT scholars, no licensing fees or commercial royalties are required to administer the scale for empirical research or professional training. Researchers utilizing the instrument are expected to cite the foundational 1981 validation paper and reference the official Self-Determination Theory website.

References

• Deci, E. L., Schwartz, A. J., Sheinman, L., & Ryan, R. M. (1981). An instrument to assess adults’ orientations toward control versus autonomy with children: Reflections on intrinsic motivation and perceived competence. Journal of Educational Psychology, 73(5), 642–650. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.73.5.642
• Reeve, J., Bolt, E., & Cai, Y. (1999). Autonomy-supportive teachers: How they teach and motivate students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(3), 537–548. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.91.3.537
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Publications. https://doi.org/10.1521/978.14625/28769
• Reeve, J. (2009). Why teachers adopt a controlling motivating style toward students and how they can become more autonomy supportive. Educational Psychologist, 44(3), 159–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520903028990
• Roth, G., Assor, A., Kanat-Maymon, Y., & Kaplan, H. (2007). Autonomous motivation for teaching: How self-determined teaching may lead to self-determined learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(4), 761–774. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.99.4.761

Items of the Scale