| A teachers' belief (TB) of teaching describes the way in which he/she views teaching. It is the unit of description used when a teacher wishes to characterize how teaching appears to him/her, and it reflects the relation between that teacher and his/her teaching experience. They seem to affect teachers' adoption of teaching strategies, and this will, in turn, influence the quality and outcome of student learning.The research focuses on identifying TB held by schoolteachers in Gansu and Xinjiang, China, and exploring the relations between these teachers' beliefs and factors concerned.We used Teachers' Beliefs Inventory (TBI) to measure TB and employed six-point scale. The TBI included 38 items. From the data obtained in this research, four dimensions were identified for delimiting and defining TB of teaching: the teachers' conceptions of students' learning, the content of teaching, evaluation and teachers' conceptions of treating students. If the score is less than 3, he/she is regarded as disagreeing with the related beliefs. If the score is between 3-4(4 included), the teacher adopts a neutral attitude of the related beliefs. Finally, if the score is larger than 4, the teacher adopts a positive attitude of the related beliefs. Except of TBI, in order to explore the relations between TB and teacher's other characters, We employed the following tools in this research: Teacher Job Involving Scale(TJIS),Teacher Intrapersonal Intelligence Scale(TIIS),Teacher Critical Thinking Scale(TCTS),Teacher' s Job Satisfaction Inventory(TJSI) and Teaching Efficacy Scale(TES).The reliabilities of 489 teachers to the TBI as indicated by the internal consistency coefficients ( Cronbach a) are .9392,.7791,.9309,.9711,.8652,.9324.A high alpha value indicates good reliability. Values above .70 are considered as adequate for research purpose. The Values above show that the alpha coefficients of the research tools range from .7791 to .9392, this suggests that the reliability of the tools is acceptable.The major findings of this study as follow:We found that all the mean scores are higher than the scale midpoint,3, this suggests that the teachers generally strongly support the teaching belief of multipleintelligence. In other words, most respondents' beliefs about teaching were more progressive approach. From the data collected by TBI, we can see that, on average, the respondents have positive acceptance of all categories of teaching beliefs. No statistically significant difference was found between teachers of different gender, nationality, age, education level, School size, band and working place (urban or rural) etc. But there were significance differences between teachers' major subjects, teachers' duty and the title of a technical post.Findings of this research suggest that TJIS, TII, TCT, TJS AND TE may have a positive impact on TB, especially TE and TII are the most powerful factor influencing TB.In-service teachers' beliefs about teaching were more affected positively by pre-service experience, but affected negatively by in-service experience. Some of their beliefs were changed from the progressive approach to the traditional approach.Findings of this research may contribute to both theoretical studies of teaching TB and practical improvements of school teaching from the following aspects.Findings of the research provide new insights to improve the present understanding of TB and their relationships to degree of teacher job involving, of teacher intrapersonal intelligence, of teacher critical thinking, and of teacher's job satisfaction.Findings of this research and the questionnaire developed in this research provide a start point for further investigations, especially within the Chinese context.Finally, teacher education program plays an important role to build and to restructure teachers' teaching beliefs. The main purpose of this study is to investigate teachers' beliefs, and to examine how the courses-taking stage and internship stage affect in-service teachers' beliefs. So, implications o...
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