Students’ perceptions of teaching behaviour in Turkish secondary education: a Mokken Scaling of My Teacher Questionnaire

Abstract

Teacher behaviour has signifcant impact on student learning and outcomes and determines the teaching quality in learning environments. The My Teacher Questionnaire (MTQ) has been used to assess students’ perceptions of teaching behaviour in national and international studies with well-cited outcomes. In this cross-sectional survey study, we adjusted and shortened the MTQ for diverse settings in Turkish secondary education, using the nonparametric IRT model, Mokken Scaling (MS). The sample consisted of 12,036 students (grade 9–12, age 15–19 years) involving 446 classes/teachers from 24 general public high schools in Turkey. More than half of the students (n=6544, 54.40%) were females, while 306 students (2.5%) did not report their gender. The MS polytomous Double Monotonicity Model (DMM) was employed for scaling the individual student data. The ten selected items (MTQ10) showed a strong unidimensional structure (H=0.61) with good internal reliability (Cronbach’s α=0.93, Molenaar Sijtsma ρ=0.93) and construct validity. The fnal structure was tested on three random data sets and convergent validity of the MTQ10 was examined using student engagement in learning. The scale MTQ10 functioned well across various groups (random samples, genders, grades, subjects). Based on these results, MTQ10 reveals strong psychometric quality for the assessment of students’ perceptions of teaching behaviour with the potential to deepen our understanding of teaching behaviours and teaching quality in Turkey.