Teaching Behaviors Questionnaire

Abstract

The Teaching Behaviors Questionnaire (TBQ) is an objective psychometric instrument developed by Gregory J. Marchant and Norman D. Bowers (1990) designed to systematically evaluate educator attitudes and normative alignment toward empirical, research-based effective pedagogical practices. Rooted in the extensive process-product research tradition of educational psychology, the instrument assesses pedagogical beliefs across six core operational domains: instructional design and structure, active teaching, giving information, questioning the student, reacting to student responses, and managing seatwork and independent assignments. Comprising 36 self-report items evaluated on a 4-point Likert-type scale ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree, the instrument provides an index of adherence to explicit direct instructional principles that correlate reliably with standardized student achievement gains.

Psychometric evaluation of the TBQ was conducted using an initial normative sample of 500 educational professionals and candidates spanning Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, comprising 300 practicing classroom teachers, 100 school principals, 50 higher education faculty members, and 50 preservice undergraduate teacher education candidates. The overall instrument demonstrated robust internal consistency, yielding a full-scale Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .76 across the composite sample, with subgroup reliability estimates ranging from .62 among undergraduate candidates to .78 among university education faculty. Construct and criterion validity were substantiated via comparative analyses among professional cohorts, item-total correlational matrices, and direct correspondence with empirically validated classroom teaching behaviors identified in meta-analytic syntheses by Brophy, Good, and Rosenshine. The TBQ serves as an essential diagnostic and formative measurement tool within teacher education, professional development architectures, instructional supervision, and institutional personnel evaluation.

Keywords

Teaching Behaviors Questionnaire, TBQ, teacher attitudes, effective teaching behaviors, process-product research, classroom management, direct instruction, teacher assessment, pedagogical psychometrics, instructional effectiveness, educational evaluation, teacher training

Authors

The Teaching Behaviors Questionnaire was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by Gregory J. Marchant and Norman D. Bowers.

• Gregory J. Marchant, Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology in the Department of Educational Psychology at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. Dr. Marchant completed his doctoral dissertation examining attitudes toward research-based effective teaching behaviors at Northwestern University (Marchant, 1988a). His scholarly agenda focuses extensively on classroom environments, educational measurement, student achievement motivation, teacher professional beliefs, and psychometric validation of educational assessments.
• Norman D. Bowers, Ph.D.: Late Professor of Education at Northwestern University, School of Education and Social Policy, Evanston, Illinois. Dr. Bowers was a pioneer in observational methodologies, teacher effectiveness research, educational measurement, and the psychometric evaluation of educator dispositions and classroom interactions.

Correspondence regarding the foundational validation studies and theoretical operationalization of the instrument was originally addressed through the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, and subsequently maintained through academic publications in journals such as Educational and Psychological Measurement.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Teaching Behaviors Questionnaire (TBQ) is to quantify the degree to which an educator’s cognitive attitudes, professional values, and pedagogical assumptions harmonize with empirical, evidence-based instructional methodologies. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, educational research transitioned from subjective evaluations of teacher personality traits toward systematic process-product inquiries that linked specific teacher behaviors to measurable gains in academic achievement. Despite the codification of these principles in empirical literature, widespread adoption was hindered by divergent professional belief systems, philosophical disagreements within teacher education academies, and persistent intuitive myths regarding classroom learning. The TBQ was engineered to directly assess this cognitive gap.

From an applied perspective, the TBQ serves critical roles across three major domains of the educational continuum:

• Preservice Teacher Preparation: In university teacher education faculties, the TBQ provides a baseline diagnostic metric to evaluate teacher candidates’ preconceived educational philosophies. Empirical data indicate that undergraduate education students often enter preparatory programs holding romanticized, discovery-oriented, or unstructured notions of learning that conflict with the reality of structured, highly monitored instruction necessary for diverse learners. By identifying these discrepancies early, educator preparation programs can tailor coursework and practicum experiences to align candidates’ cognitive models with empirical classroom research.
• Inservice Teacher Development and Instructional Coaching: For certified practicing teachers, the instrument identifies individual professional learning needs. Instead of relying on idiosyncratic administrator evaluations, instructional coaches and school principals can utilize the TBQ to systematically uncover pedagogical blind spots—such as ineffective questioning wait-time, inappropriate praise regimens, or failure to maintain active independent seatwork supervision. The results guide targeted professional development, peer coaching cycles, and structured mentoring interventions.
• Personnel Selection, Screening, and Administrative Supervision: School districts and administrative hiring committees face substantial challenges in assessing whether teaching applicants understand and implement validated teaching protocols. The TBQ offers a standardized, objective screening instrument to identify candidates whose pedagogical orientation prioritizes high academic expectations, clear structure, and active direct delivery over non-systematic or unguided classroom methods.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Teaching Behaviors Questionnaire is normative attitude toward empirical, research-based effective teaching behaviors. Drawing from social psychology and attitude-behavior consistency models (such as Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior), teacher attitudes toward pedagogical practices serve as powerful cognitive schemas that filter instructional decision-making, curriculum planning, and spontaneous classroom management reactions. Rather than conceptualizing teaching competence solely as physical classroom actions, the TBQ measures the underlying belief structure that legitimizes or devalues explicit instructional paradigms.

The TBQ operationalizes this overarching construct across six distinct behavioral domains derived from comprehensive reviews of effective teaching literature:

• Instructional Design and Structure: This dimension assesses attitudes regarding systematic lesson architecture, organization, and sequencing. Effective instruction mandates clear advance organizers, brief instructional presentations (typically under 20 minutes to prevent cognitive overload), proactive presentation of rules and procedures at the start of the school year, and explicit articulation of lesson objectives and terminal performance criteria. An illustrative item reflecting this construct includes: “The teacher should begin lessons and presentations to the class with a review or an overview of the material” (Item 35).
• Active Teaching: This subscale measures the degree to which an educator endorses direct, whole-group, teacher-led instruction over unguided exploratory or passive formats. It emphasizes prioritizing academic instructional time, sustaining high collective engagement, maintaining universal academic expectations for all students, and conveying enthusiastic teacher presence. Exemplified by Item 5: “The teacher should spend most of the class time teaching the student as one whole group.”
• Giving Information: This domain focuses on the clarity, directness, and precision with which curriculum content is communicated. It opposes deliberate ambiguity, excessive use of abstract or unfamiliar vocabulary, or leaving students to decipher foundational instructional goals independently without teacher scaffolding. Representative items include: “The teacher should identify the main ideas of a lesson during the lesson and at the end of the lesson” (Item 30).
• Questioning the Student: This subscale captures attitudes toward dynamic classroom discourse, question pacing, and structural interrogation strategies. It encompasses critical process-product findings such as maintaining a minimum of three seconds of “wait time” before soliciting an answer (allowing for cognitive processing across diverse ability tiers) and equitably distributing questions among both volunteering and nonvolunteering students to sustain universal accountability. Exemplified by Item 14: “The teacher should wait at least 3 seconds after asking a question in class before calling on a student.”
• Reacting to Student Responses: This component evaluates how teachers handle correct and incorrect student contributions. Grounded in research on classroom feedback mechanisms, it measures the endorsement of immediate, non-punitive rephrasing or scaffolding following incorrect answers, explicit acknowledgment of correct answers without relying on superficial or excessive praise, and continuous reteaching of problematic concepts before advancing. Representative items include: “The teacher should rephrase the question to the student when an incorrect answer is given in class” (Item 17).
• Handling Seatwork and Homework Assignments: This dimension measures beliefs regarding independent learning intervals, student accountability, and guided practice. Effective teaching research confirms that independent work should only occur following explicit demonstrations, that teachers must actively circulate throughout the room rather than remain seated at a desk, that assignments must achieve high initial success rates (90–100%) to prevent frustration, and that monitoring must be systematic and continuous. Exemplified by Item 20: “The teacher should move around the classroom during the time that the students are working independently at their seats.”

Theoretical Framework

The TBQ is theoretically situated within the paradigm of process-product educational research, an empirical school of thought that dominated educational psychology throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Spearheaded by educational researchers such as Jere Brophy, Thomas Good, Barak Rosenshine, Donald Medley, and Jane Stallings, this paradigm shifted focus from subjective, trait-based models of the “good teacher” toward observable, quantifiable teacher behaviors (“processes”) that systematically correlated with standardized student learning outcomes (“products”).

Foundational assumptions supporting the TBQ framework include:

1. The Primacy of Direct Instruction and Cognitive Load Optimization: Grounded in cognitive load theory and direct instruction models, the TBQ posits that effective learning, particularly of fundamental skills and structured knowledge, occurs when instructors minimize extraneous processing. By breaking complex tasks into small increments, providing immediate guided practice, and checking for understanding before releasing students to independent work, teachers foster greater schema acquisition.
2. Universal Academic Focus and High Expectations: Drawing from the Pygmalion effect literature documented by Rosenthal and Jacobson and expanded by Good and Brophy, the framework assumes that effective educators reject deficit models of student capability. Instead, they maintain high expectations that all students—rather than a privileged subset—can master the intended curriculum when proper scaffolding is deployed.
3. Active Classroom Management and Proctoring: Deriving from Jacob Kounin’s foundational work on classroom management (specifically constructs of “withitness,” overlappingness, and smooth transitions), the TBQ asserts that teacher mobility, rapid feedback, and proactive structuring prevent disruption and maintain academic learning time (ALT).
4. Cognitive Schema of Teacher Beliefs: In alignment with social-cognitive paradigms (Bandura, 1986), an educator’s instructional actions are largely governed by their cognitive belief structures. If an educator holds the attitude that unguided discovery is inherently superior to explicit modeling, they are far more likely to abandon effective scaffolding behaviors. Measuring these attitudes provides direct insight into the internal drivers of observable instructional performance.

Validity

The construct, content, and criterion-related validity of the Teaching Behaviors Questionnaire have been established across multiple validation studies (Marchant, 1988a, 1988b; Marchant & Bowers, 1988, 1990).

Content Validity

Content validity was established through an exhaustive synthesis of literature on effective teaching behaviors. Items were directly derived from empirical meta-analyses, observational rubrics, and consensus reports published by educational researchers (e.g., Brophy & Good, 1986; Rosenshine, 1983). The preliminary item pool underwent systematic expert scrutiny to ensure that every statement accurately reflected demonstrated relationships with student achievement. Following pilot testing on four graduate cohorts comprising 60 practicing educators, ambiguous, double-barreled, and non-discriminating items were pruned to yield the final 36-item instrument.

Construct and Known-Groups Validity

Construct validity was demonstrated through known-groups comparisons involving 500 participants across diverse tiers of the professional educational hierarchy: 300 classroom teachers, 100 school principals, 50 college education faculty members, and 50 undergraduate education students. The underlying construct hypothesis asserted that groups with extensive formal scholarship and leadership accountability regarding effective teaching literature would score significantly higher than inexperienced novices.

Analyses revealed statistically significant mean differences among these groups: college education faculty members demonstrated the highest level of agreement with empirically validated teaching behaviors, closely followed by school principals and practicing teachers. In contrast, undergraduate education students exhibited significantly lower overall agreement scores. This finding confirmed that the TBQ is sensitive to professional development, formal pedagogical training, and direct exposure to educational science, effectively discriminating between expert consensus and novice assumptions.

Item-Total and Distributional Properties

Item-total correlation analyses verified that the 36 items contributed meaningfully to the composite construct of effective teaching attitudes. Normal distribution analyses conducted across the sample confirmed that scores fit normal bell-curve distributions without exhibiting severe ceiling or floor effects, verifying that the scale possesses sufficient variance to detect both subtle individual differences and programmatic shifts across cohorts.

Reliability

The internal consistency of the Teaching Behaviors Questionnaire was evaluated by Marchant and Bowers (1990) across the aggregate sample of 500 participants as well as within individual professional subgroups.

For the full normative sample ($N = 500$), the TBQ demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .76, representing an acceptable level of internal consistency for a multidimensional attitude inventory designed to span six distinct classroom operational categories. Reliability estimates calculated independently for each subgroup revealed substantial variations based on professional maturity and academic immersion:

• College Education Faculty: $\alpha = .78$ ($n = 50$)
• School Principals: $\alpha = .76$ ($n = 100$)
• Practicing Classroom Teachers: $\alpha = .74$ ($n = 300$)
• Undergraduate Education Students: $\alpha = .62$ ($n = 50$)

The lower coefficient observed among undergraduate candidates is theoretically congruent with developmental models of teacher socialization: preservice candidates have not yet consolidated their professional belief structures, resulting in higher internal response variability compared to seasoned practitioners and teacher educators whose attitudes are anchored in established instructional schemas.

Factor Analysis

During the developmental phase of the TBQ, item generation was guided by a rational-theoretical six-factor taxonomy established from process-product research: instructional design and structure, active teaching, giving information, questioning the student, reacting to student responses, and handling seatwork/homework assignments. Subsequent exploratory factor analytic (EFA) procedures and item-total correlation assessments confirmed that while the items clustered logically across these pedagogical categories, the total score maintained strong psychometric coherence as a generalized latent construct representing “adherence to research-based effective teaching behaviors.”

Exploratory factor analyses indicated that the strongest loading items were those addressing active, structured classroom interactions, including wait-time intervals (Item 14), instructional review routines (Item 35), independent work success thresholds (Item 32), and non-punitive rephrasing during student error management (Item 17). Factor loadings across the primary structural dimensions clustered between .35 and .68. In subsequent psychometric appraisals of teacher attitude inventories, researchers have supported the dual utility of the TBQ: it can be interpreted as a unified unidimensional metric for screening and composite benchmarking, or decomposed into its six operational categories for diagnostic profiling and targeted professional development interventions.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Self-report pedagogical attitude inventory / diagnostic survey
• Target Population: Preservice teacher candidates, practicing K–12 classroom educators, instructional coaches, school principals, and teacher educators
• Item Count: 36 items
• Response Format: 4-point Likert-type agreement scale (Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree)
• Subscale Structure (6 Categories):
  • Instructional Design and Structure
  • Active Teaching
  • Giving Information
  • Questioning the Student
  • Reacting to Student Responses
  • Handling Seatwork and Homework Assignments
• Scoring Formula:
  • Direct Scored Items: Strongly Disagree = 4; Disagree = 3; Agree = 2; Strongly Agree = 1.
  • Reverse-Scored Items: Strongly Disagree = 1; Disagree = 2; Agree = 3; Strongly Agree = 4.
  • The following 21 items are reversed in scoring: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, and 35.
  • Composite Score: Total score is computed by summing the points across all 36 items. Higher composite scores represent higher alignment with empirical, research-based effective teaching behaviors.
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Teaching Behaviors Questionnaire was formally published in 1990 in the journal Educational and Psychological Measurement, following doctoral research completed in 1988 by Gregory J. Marchant at Northwestern University under the mentorship of Norman D. Bowers. The questionnaire is typically accessible for non-commercial educational, scholarly, and programmatic evaluation purposes under standard academic fair-use guidelines, provided appropriate attribution to the authors and original journal publication is maintained. Commercial applications, widespread institutional integration into commercial evaluation suites, or published adaptations require formal permission from the copyright holders and the publisher (SAGE Publications).

References

• Brophy, J., & Good, T. L. (1986). Teacher behavior and student achievement. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (3rd ed., pp. 328–375). Macmillan.
• Marchant, G. J. (1988a). Attitudes toward research-based effective teaching behaviors (Doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University). ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
• Marchant, G. J. (1988b). Attitudes toward research-based effective teaching behaviors from teachers, principals, and college faculties and students. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Mid-Western Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL. ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 303 449
• Marchant, G. J., & Bowers, N. D. (1988). Teacher agreement with research-based effective teaching behaviors. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA. ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 302 503
• Marchant, G. J., & Bowers, N. D. (1990). An attitude inventory for research-based effective teaching behaviors. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 50(1), 167–174. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164490501018
• Rosenshine, B. (1983). Teaching functions in instructional programs. The Elementary School Journal, 83(4), 335–351. https://doi.org/10.1086/461321

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)