Diagnostics of Motivating and Demotivating Styles of Teachers: “Situations-in-School” Questionnaire

Abstract

There is a certain lack of of instruments for assessing the relationship between learning outcomes and the teacher’s communication style with students which determines children’s involvement in the learning process and their motivation.The article presents the results of adapting the self-determination theory-based questionnaire, Situations-in-School, for Russian-speaking educational environments on a sample of primary and secondary school teachers (N = 1400) from nine regions of Russia.This questionnaire assesses the four basic styles of teacher-student interaction (autonomy support, structure, control, and chaos) and their subtypes.The results of multidimensional scaling and confirmatory factor analysis indicate that the structure of the questionnaire at the level of items and subscales corresponds to a circular model (circumplex).The presence of eight subscales in the structure of the questionnaire is confirmed by CFA.The correlations of the scales with indicators of resilience and professional self-efficacy indicate construct validity.The questionnaire can be used both for research purposes and in the practice of school psychologists to assess the style of communication between teachers and students.

Keywords

• assessing the teachers’ motivating style
• motivating and demotivating styles
• situations-in-school questionnaire
• self-determination theory
• autonomy
• structure
• chaos