Guangzhou City Elementary School Teachers' Beliefs Research

The research about teachers' beliefs is a very important and valuableeducational research field, which is greatly helpful to the comprehensionof the teaching progress, the curriculum transformation and developmentand the teachers' professional development as well as provides somereference and consultation for the training of teachers. At present, thereare not much fruits of measurement and assessment about teachers' beliefsin China. To enrich the practical research of teachers' beliefs, basedon The Teachers' Beliefs Inventory, which is developed by Lv Guoguang,a Chinese scholar, in this study, the author uses Beliefs of Management,Beliefs of Curriculum and Instruction, Beliefs of Assessment, Beliefs ofStudy as four dimensionalities of the questionnaire, and after thepreceding research and the formal research, preliminarily makes up theElementary School Teachers' Beliefs Questionnaire, which is suitablefor the elementary school teachers in Guangzhou region and has goodmeasurement traits indices.In the preceding research, 110 elementary school teachers in 2elementary schools which are located in Tianhe and Haizhu districts ofGuangzhou were randomly sampled as the subjects. Through the statisticanalysis of the results in the preceding research, some unsuitable itemswere deleted and amended, and the formal questionnaire was finallydeveloped. In the formal research, the method of the randomly sampled atdifferent levels was adopted. Haizhu district was taken as example, and248 elementary school teachers of 5 elementary schools in this districtwere randomly sampled as the investigating subjects. By the way ofanalysis of reliability and validity and confirmatory analysis, themeasurement traits of the formal questionnaire were inspected to furtherassess the practicability of the questionnaire. Moreover, with the use of descriptive analysis and analysis of variance, the author analyzes theoverall status of the elementary school teachers' beliefs in Guangzhouas well as brings forward some relevant suggestion of the cultivation ofteachers' beliefs.The results of this study are as follows:1,The measurement indices of the whole scale such as consistencyreliability, split-half reliability and construct validity are good sothat this questionnaire can be a suitable measure tool to assess theelementary school teachers' beliefs.2,The elementary school teachers' beliefs are not remarkablydifferent in respect of gender and diploma, but they are significantlydifferent in respect of the type of schools and courses.3,The teachers' beliefs would change, develop and update, but thisis a slow, pragmatic process. We should lay emphasis on the cultivationof teachers' open, development-oriented beliefs in the beginning stageof the teaching occupation and provide positive support, encouragementand guidance during the period of the teachers' career.