The Measurement of Teacher’s Beliefs About Ability: Development of the Beliefs About Learning and Teaching Questionnaire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to present the scale items, the statistical characteristics, and evidence of validity of the previously unpublished Beliefs about Learning and Teaching Questionnaire that examines elementary teachers’ epistemological beliefs and their beliefs about learning and teaching in inclusive classrooms. In this study, 186 teachers completed the questionnaire. Reliability analysis yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of .81. A factor analysis yielded four factors, including teachers’ beliefs about ability and their preferences for teacher-controlled and student-centred instruction. To examine the relationship between teachers’ beliefs about ability and their beliefs about disability and their responsibilities in working with students with disabilities, 36 teachers completed both the revised questionnaire and a semi-structured interview focused on beliefs and practices, the Pathognomonic-Interventionist Interview. The results suggest that teachers have varying beliefs about their roles and responsibilities in working with students with disabilities, and they provide evidence that these beliefs are related to their more widely held epistemological beliefs about ability. These range from a belief that ability is fixed and is unlikely to be influenced by learning and instruction, to a belief that ability is fluid and malleable, that it is increased by learning and therefore is responsive to instruction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".