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JOURNAL OF APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 17,453-473 (1996)

Nursery School Teachers’ Control Beliefs, Beliefs About Development

and Education, and Educational Action

CHRISTIANE VANDENPLAS-HOLPER

Universite’ Catholique de Louvain

Twenty-four nursery school teachers were given Levenson’s (1974) questionnaire on control beliefs and rating scales referring to their belief in nature’s and nurture’s

contributions to the child’s development. They were then involved in a semistructured play situation with children of their class, 31 to 52 months old, in a small group setting. The entire situation was videorecorded. In a structured interview, the teachers had to respond to several questions referring to development and education and the interview was submitted to content analysis. Finally, the teachen’ educational action was rated from the video recordings as to distancing and directive strategies. Internal control beliefs, a reement with nature’s contribution to the child’s development, and the proportion o 3 references to cognitive-developmental processes predicted educational action aggregated from distancing and directive strategies and explained a high percentage of variance. Internal control was the most powerful predictor.

Children’s social cognition has been widely explored in the past 2 decades. Since the early 198Os, many studies have been published on parents’ and, to a lesser degree, teachers’ social cognition about developmental and educational processes (Goodnow, 1988; Miller, 1988; Vandenplas-Holper, 1987). The variety of theoretical frameworks and research methods used has been extensive. Knowl- edge and beliefs about developmental and educational processes, control beliefs, and educational action are some of the numerous aspects that have been investi- gated.

The main objective of this study was to predict nursery school teachers’

This study is part of the project “La relation putricultrice-enfant darts le cadre des institutions d’accueil de jour pour le jeune enfant”, supported by a “credit aux chercheurs” of the “Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique”, Bruxelles. Nadine Bare, FranGoise Bauret, Catherine Bodart, Anne

Ghysselinckx-Janssens, Joelle Goethals, Francoise Matthis, BCnCdicte Dapsens, and Jo&lle Desmet

participated in various aspects of data collection and analysis, the two latter in partial fulfilment of their master’s thesis. The nursery school teachers were dependable and enthusiastic participants in

this study. Irving E. Sigel provided helpful comments for the final version of the article. James Day

kindly improved the English style. I heartily thank all of them.

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Christiane Vandenplas-Holper, Unite

de Psychologie du Developpement Humain, Universite Catholique de Louvain, 10, Place du Cardinal Mercier, B-1348 Louvain-la Neuve, Belgium.

453

454 VANDENPLAS-HOLPER

educational action in a blockbuilding situation from their control beliefs as well as their beliefs and knowledge concerning development and education. A secondary aim was to provide descriptive evidence concerning some aspects of their control beliefs and beliefs on development and education. Teachers’ educational action was rated multidimensionnally from videorecordings made in the blockbuilding situation. Their control beliefs were assessed from Levenson’s (1974) questionnaire concerning internal control, control by powerful others, and control by chance. Their beliefs concerning development and education were assessed from their ratings concerning the nature-nurture issue and from an interview concerning the blockbuilding situation. Two variables were derived. One of them concerned the teachers’ knowledge referring to play. The other concerned the respective importance of cognitive-developmental and learning processes. The study adapts to teachers measures that have been used mainly with parents and tries to combine into an integrated whole different frameworks, which have been used separately by various other researchers.

Educational action has been operationalized multidimensionally both in terms of distancing strategies, defined as educational action by which the teacher stimulates the child’s cognitive abilities without proposing ready-made solutions, and in terms of directive strategies. The operalization of distancing strategies was inspired from Sigel’s (1986) and McGillicudy-De Lisi’s (1985) work and freely adapted to the blockbuilding situation used in the present study. Directive strategies were conceptualized, in accordance with Schaffer and Crook (1979, 1980), and Skinner (1985), as actions used to change another’s action. Their function is to orient the child’s action toward a certain direction, inhibiting some actions and enhancing others.

Numerous studies have assessed adults’ control beliefs and related them to various other facets of personality or behavior (Dubois, 1987). With respect to education, Bomewasser (1979) and Mielke (1979) both assessed personality variables, attitudinal variables, and variables referring to educational action. Although Mielke’s study which used Levenson’s (1974) questionnaire on control beliefs was rather inconclusive, Bomewasser found that personality and attitudinal variables predicted teachers’ action much better than did attitudinal variables alone. Stevens (1988) found that for adult Black and White low-income mothers, internal personal control, as assessed by an abbreviated form of the Adult Nowocki-Strickland Internal-External Control Scale, predicted the mothers’ parental skill, measured by the total score of the Home Observation for Measure- ment of the Environment (HOME) Inventory. This instrument includes items referring to emotional and verbal responsivity of the mother, to opportunities for variety in daily stimulation, and so forth.

Several studies have been concerned with concepts related to the nature- nurture issue. Miller, White, and Delgado (1980), for example, examined among other things how parents and nonparents attributed children’s abilities, conceptualized within Piaget’s theory, to different developmental and educational

CONTROL AND DEVELOPMENTAL-EDUCATIONAL BELIEFS 455

causes: parental teaching, school teaching, interaction with peers, self-discovery, and inborn knowledge. Participants had to rate the relative importance of these different causes on a 3-point scale ranging from 1 (very important) to 3 (unimpor- runt). Results showed that for all participants, self-discovery was considered as most important, inborn knowledge and interaction with peers as least important; parental and school teaching occupied an intermediate status. Mugny and Car- ugati (1985) presented several questionnaires to parents and teachers who had to express the degree of their agreement or disagreement with numerous statements referring to the nature of intelligence, developmental processes, and educational action. A biological-maturational conception of individual differences appeared as the first factor in factor analyses. Kochanska, Yarrow, Kuczynski, and Fried- man (1987) measured the degree to which mothers attributed their children’s development to parental influence, genetics, or uncontrollable factors. Mothers perceived their own input in their child’s development as more important than that of biological-genetic factors. Going beyond these studies, this investigation tries to relate teacher’s beliefs concerning nature and nurture to their educational action.

Relations between parental beliefs and educational action have been studied mainly by Sigel (1985, 1986) and his coworkers (e.g., McGillicuddy-De Lisi, 1982, 1985). They assessed parental beliefs about developmental and educational processes from individual interviews submitted to content analysis. The belief variables loading on the first principal component that emerged from a principal component analysis were consistent with the view that the child actively con- structs his or her knowledge. Educational action, assessed by systematic observation, was conceptualized in terms of distancing strategies in which the parents encourage the child to move cognitively away from the “here and now” by asking him or her to anticipate, to plan, and to choose among alternative actions. Results indicated that parental beliefs and distancing strategies were only slightly related and that various other variables, such as socioeconomic status, the family structure, and so forth, played a moderating role.

A study of Stevens has documented positive relations between mothers’ knowledge concerning child development and their educational action. Stevens (in Miller, 1988, p. 276) assessed maternal beliefs about development using a scale of mothers’ knowledge of environmental influences on development and a scale of infant abilities. For each scale, a positive correlation was found with the HOME inventory.

The prediction made in this study of the teacher’s educational action from their control beliefs and their beliefs concerning development and education was based on several hypotheses. The two main hypotheses of the study refer to the relation between control beliefs and educational action. Internal control would be the best predictor of teachers’ distancing strategies: The teachers who are themselves high in internal control would encourage children to be internally controlled by stimulating problem-solving behavior to a high degree. Teachers


who perceive themselves as highly controlled by powerful others would act themselves as powerful others toward the children and impose on them numerous directives. Teachers’ perceived control by powerful others would thus be a predictor of their directive strategies. Several other hypotheses refer to the relation between beliefs about development and education and educational action.

With respect to the nature-nurture concepts, it was predicted that teachers agreeing that nature played an important part in the child’s development would adopt a “wait-and-see” strategy and perform educational action at a low level.

Based on Stevens’s findings (in Miller, 1988), it was finally predicted that knowledge on play would be positively related to educational action, and particularly to directive strategies.

It was also expected that teachers expressing a high proportion of cognitive- developmental beliefs would implement their beliefs by using a rather high degree of distancing strategies because distancing strategies are conceptualized in cognitive-developmental terms. In line with the findings of Sigel and his coworkers, this relation was expected to be a moderate one.

With respect to the secondary aim of the study concerning descriptive evidence, two predictions were made. First, it was expected, according to numerous studies reviewed by Dubois (1987) and Leyens (1983), that in Levenson’s (1974) questionnaire, the teachers would score higher on internal control beliefs than on external beliefs, referring to powerful others and chance. Second, according to the results of Miller et al. (1980) and Kochanska et al. (1987), it was also expected that teachers would agree more with nurture’s contribution to the child’s development than with nature’s contribution.

METHOD

Sample Twenty-four female teachers volunteered to participate in the study. They were responsible for the first class in municipal, state and Catholic nursery schools located within a range of approximately 30 km from Louvain-la-Neuve, Bel- gium. Their ages ranged from 21 to 43 years old, with a mean of 29.17 years old. The children’s ages ranged from 3 1 to 52 months old, with a mean of 44 months old. All were Belgian and middle-class, as assessed from the parents’ professions reported in the school files.

The sample was selected on the basis of the proximity of the school to Louvain-la-Neuve and of agreement to participate in the study. First, the head of the school was contacted by phone or by letter and asked if he or she would allow his or her nursery school teachers and some of the children in their classes to participate in a study on children’s play. If the head of the school agreed with this request, the teachers were then visited in their schools by the two undergraduate students who collected the data. The different phases of the projected study were described to the teachers. Several children in the classes of the teachers who had


agreed to participate in the study were preselected on the basis of behavioral descriptions of easy and difficult children. 1 A letter describing the study was sent to the parents of these children. The parents were asked to sign a paper saying that they consented to their children accompanying their teacher to the research laboratory located in Louvain-la-Neuve. The final sample was selected on the basis of the school directors’, the teachers’ and the parents’ informed consent.

Procedure Teachers who had agreed to participate in the study were asked to respond to Levenson’s (1974) questionnaire on control beliefs and to two items tapping their beliefs with respect to nature’s and nurture’s contribution to children’s development. Each of the teachers then came to the research laboratory with four children of her class. The children were given Duplo Lego plastic building blocks of different sizes, shapes, and colors which could be assembled into nonfigurative and figurative constructions. The teacher was asked to attend to the children as she would in the classroom. Because teachers organize occasionally small-group activities in. their classroom, this request was in line with their everyday experi- ence. The blockbuilding situation inspired from Quoirin-DeRidder (1991) lasted 20 min. It was filmed by two visible cameras and videorecorded by a splitscreen television device. Two focal children-the easy and the difficult child of each group-were recorded by the same camera for 10 min each. This recording appeared on the upper part of the screen. The other two children were not included in the study, but participated in the play situation in order to create an environment with the maximum of ecological validity. The teacher was filmed continuously by a second camera; this recording appeared on the lower part of the screen. The teachers were interviewed while watching the videorecording which had been made. The whole interview was tape recorded, transcribed, and submitted to content analysis according to a coding manual which had been written especially for the study. The content analysis of the interview constituted the source for the teachers’ “knowledge on play” and the “proportion of cognitive-developmental processes”-two other measures referring to the teacher’s developmental beliefs. In the absence of the teachers, the videorecordings were also rated with respect to the teachers’ educational action.

Materials and Measures

Control Beliefs. Levenson’s (1974) questionnaire on control beliefs is com- posed of 8 items referring to internal control (e.g., “I can pretty much determine

IA comparative study of the teachers’ descriptions of easy and difficult children is described elsewhere (Vandenplas-Ho&r, submitted). This article is based on the analysis of the teachers’

answers in the interview and the rating of their educational action disregarding the easy-diffkult

status of the child.


what will happen in my life” and “How many friends I have depends on how nice a person I am”), 8 items referring to external control by powerful others (e.g., “People like myself have very little chance of protecting our personal interests when they conflict with those of strong pressure groups” and “If important people were to decide they didn’t like me, I probably wouldn’t make many friends”), and 8 items referring to external control by chance (e.g., “When I get what I want, it’s usually because I am lucky” and “Whether or not I get into a car accident is mostly a matter of luck”). The questionnaire had been translated into French and reformulated several times with the assistance of a native English speaker. The French version was given to the teachers who were asked to express their agreement or disagreement with each item on a 6-point rating scale.

Before aggregating the scores of the Levenson scale, a tentative principal component factor analysis was performed on the data gathered from the 24 teachers. By the Varimax rotation with three factors retained, the “internal control” factor accounted for 17.38% of the total variance, the “control by powerful others” factor for 17.33%, and the “control by chance” factor for 12.41%. The three factors accounted overall for 47.12%. Despite the fact that this factor analysis is not based on a sample of sufficient size, but because Levenson’s factor structure had been replicated from data gathered on a large sample of secondary school teachers who had been administered a German translation of the original questionnaire (Mielke, 1979), means were calculated for the eight items of each of Levenson’s (1974) scales. For each scale, a score of 1 expressed a score of perfect disagreement and a score of 6, perfect agreement.

Test-retest reliability assessed by Pearson correlations on a sample of 33 primary school teachers within a IO-day interval was .67 for internal control, .84 for control by powerful others, and .71 for control by chance. Means for the second administration were not significantly different from those of the first administration.

Beliefs About Development and Education. Two of the variables were based on the rating scales referring to nature’s and to nurture’s contribution to the child’s development. Two other variables were derived from the content analysis of the interview.

Beliefs concerning the nature-nurture issue based on the rating scales. Teachers were presented with the following written statements:

Some people consider that the development of a child’s intelligence, of his or her language, and his or her relations with other people depends mainly on:

(a) his or her parents and grandparents and what he or she inherited from them; (b) his or her environment, mainly parents’ and teachers’ educational action.

Statement A tapped the teacher’s perception of nature’s contribution to development; Statement B tapped the teachers’ perception of the contribution of nurture to development. Only one item was used to tap each of these variables. The


teachers had to express their agreement or disagreement with each of these statements on a 6-point rating scale. The ratings for nature’s and nurture’s contributions to the child’s development were each considered as separate measures. For each statement, a score of 1 indicated strong disagreement and a score of 6 strong agreement. Test-retest reliability assessed on the sample of primary school teachers was .60 for nature’s and .71 for nurture’s contribution to the child’s development.

The interview and belief measures derived from the interview. In order to familiarize herself with the videorecording and to adapt to viewing her own image (Linard & Park, 1984; Wagner, 1988), each of the teachers watched the videorecording made of herself and the four children from her class alone.

The teachers then watched the videorecording a second time in the presence of the interviewer and had to respond to an individual structured interview. The teacher was asked to describe “the actions she could observe” for the two focal children, to comment on the similarities and dissimilarities she had perceived between what she just observed and what she usually observed in the classroom. The data gathered from these initial steps of the interview are analyzed elsewhere (Vandenplas-Holper, 1995).

The teacher then was asked in which way the building block activity could contribute to the children’s development. Knowledge on play was defined as the number of categories mentioned by the teacher. The six categories referred to by the teachers were the following: (a) sensorimotor handling (“They have to learn how to pile up blocks”); (b) fantasy and symbolization (“It is very creative; they figure out lots of things”); (c) cognition defined as anticipation, choice, and scholastic learning (“It is possible to teach mathematics”); (d) social relations (“They will have to share the blocks, to exchange them without quarrelling”); (e) language considered with respect to its technical features (“They learn vocabu- lary”); and (f) aesthetic feeling (“There is beauty in what they have built”).

Beliefs about development and education were further tapped by four questions: (a) Enumerating those aspects of the children’s development which had just been mentioned by the teacher, the interviewer asked her to explain how children learn these aspects and become proficient in them; (b) the teacher was then asked how much she could contribute to the development of one of the focal children and commented on her answer; (c) the same question was asked with respect to the second focal child; and (d) the teacher was finally asked what she had intended to do during the play session and was then debriefed.

For teachers’ answers to each of these questions, developmental and educational processes were categorized into three broad categories: biological-maturational processes, processes referring to cognitive-developmental theories, and processes referring to learning theories. Biological processes were further quali- fied by three subcategories, cognitive-developmental processes by three subcategories and learning processes by two subcategories. The three subcategories considered for biological-maturational processes were the following: the teach-


er’s conception that development is determined by heredity (“There is first of all a hereditary potential”), that the child develops spontaneously (“I think it is a progression which occurs automatically”), and that no educational action has to be performed (“I discretely look at them”). Cognitive-developmental and leam- ing processes refer to interpersonal action and interaction with the environment. The three subcategories considered for cognitive-developmental processes were the following: The teacher considers the child’s action (they learn “by saying what they built”; “ by playing with the mannequins”), peer relations (“It is more important that they learn by mutual interaction”) and her discrete child-centered educational action performed only at certain moments or in a playful way (“Yes, I intervene, but only when she is in trouble”; “ let’s say that I do not intervene; I just play with them”). The two subcategories considered for learning processes were the following: The teacher considers the play material (“because blocks are very different”; “there is a diversity of colours”) and her educational directive action (“I perhaps oriented them”; “I asked them to build something”). Both are elements exterior to the child.

For each question, answers were coded with respect to the presence or absence of each of the subcategories: three for maturational-biological factors, three for cognitive-developmental processes, and two for learning processes. Answers were then summed across the four questions. The proportion of cognitive-developmental processes was established only from answers concerning cognitive-developmental and learning processes. This measure was obtained by dividing the total number of references to cognitive-developmental processes by the total number of references to learning and cognitive-developmental processes. The proportion equals 1 when references have been made only to cognitive-developmental processes, decreases when some references have also been made to learning theories, and equals 0 if no reference to cognitive-developmental theories has been made.

The computations which have been described are illustrated by the data gathered from three teachers. Teacher 1 referred four times to biological-maturational processes, five times to cognitive-developmental processes, and once to learning processes. Teacher 2 referred once to biological-maturational processes, made no reference to cognitive-developmental processes, and referred three times to learning processes. Teacher 3 referred once to biological-maturational processes, seven times to cognitive-developmental processes, and two times to learning processes. For these teachers, the proportion of cognitive- developmental beliefs was .83, 0, and .78, respectively.

Intercoder reliability was assessed at different steps of the analysis. Tran- scripts were first divided into their units of analysis. The mean intercoder agreement calculated for 16 transcripts by Bravais-Pearson’s coefficient was .96. After disagreements had been eliminated by discussion, transcripts were further coded into the different subcategories and reliability was assessed for eight


transcripts. For knowledge on play, the Bravais-Pearson coefficient was .95. Cohen’s kappa for processes of development and education was .85.

Teachers’ Educational Action. Teachers’ educational action was rated multidimensionally as to distancing strategies and directive strategies.

Distancing strategies were defined as educational actions by which the teacher stimulates the child’s cognitive abilities by inviting him or her to think, without proposing ready-made solutions. The use of general and specific questions, the appeal to reasoning in order to solve problems, and the involvement in symbolic play were the main operational indicators for distancing strategies.

As opposed to distancing strategies, directive strategies were defined as actions used by the teacher to change the child’s behavior into a certain direction. Verbal and nonverbal prohibitive actions, directions, appeals to attention, pre- sentations of a model, intervention in the child’s construction, changing the accessibility of the play materials, and references made in a declarative mode to concepts (e.g., size, number, color, positive verbal reinforcement, etc.) were the main operational indicators for directive strategies.

The two lists of indicators for operationalization of directive and distancing strategies which were given to the raters are reproduced in the Appendix. Two raters rated the 24 videorecordings for distancing strategies and two other raters rated them for directive strategies. The raters were asked to take personal notes while watching the videorecordings in order to rate them; they made a mark at each occurrence of each of the behaviors listed. These personal notes formed the basis for the assignment of the rating scores on a 9-point scale. The raters had first to decide if the teacher being rated used the strategy with a low, medium, or high frequency and then to chose a more detailed 9-point score. The raters were allowed to revise the scores they had already assigned as they progressed in their task for the 24 teachers. Interrater agreement assessed for the 24 teachers by the Bravais-Pearson coefftcient was .96 for distancing strategies, and .97 for directive strategies. For distancing strategies and directive strategies, the mean ratings for both raters were used as separate variables for educational action.

RESULTS

Descriptive data for all of the variables used in the study and the testing of the secondary Hypotheses F and G are reported in the first part of the results section. The second and most important part of this section reports the results referring to the main hypotheses-A, B, C, D, and E-of the study.

Descriptive Measures Descriptive data are provided in Table 1. The two hypotheses referring to descriptive data were confirmed. With respect to Hypothesis F concerning controE


TABLE 1 Means, Standard Deviations, Minimum and Maximum for Control Beliefs, for Beliefs About Development, and Education and for Educational Action

Variables

Control Beliefs Internal Powerful others Chance

Beliefs About Development and Education Nature Nurture Knowledge on play Proportion of cognitive-developmental processes

Educational Action Distancing strategies Directive strategies

M SD

4.31 0.90 2.27 0.70 2.44 0.74

3.21 0.98 5.33 1.09 3.75 1.03 0.52 0.22

5.77 2.12 4.00 3.05

Minimum and Maximum

1.75-5.86 1 .OO-3.63 1.50-4.25

1 .oo-5.00 2.00-6.00 2.00-6.00 0.00-0.86

1 .oo-9.00 1 .oo-9.00

beliefs, the highest mean was found for belief in internal control by teachers. An analysis of variance for repeated measures showed that the means for internal control, control by powerful others, and control by chance differed significantly, F(2, 46) = 64.19, p = .OOOl. In order to explore further these differences, the three means were compared pairwise by t tests for related samples. Internal control versus control by powerful others, and internal control versus external control by chance, differed significantly with t(23) = 9.69, p = .OOl, and t(23) = 8.50, p = .OOl, respectively. Control by powerful others and control by chance did not differ significantly. With respect to Hypothesis G concerning the nature-nurture issue, a t test for related samples showed that teachers were significantly more in agreement with the notion of nurture’s contribution to children’s development than with that of nature, t(23) = -7.65, p < .OOl.

The data were further scrutinized with respect to issues for which no precise hypotheses had been made. As to educational action, teachers were rated significantly higher on distancing strategies than on directive strategies. The t test for related samples was 2.84, p < .Ol.

The proportion of cognitive-developmental processes was .52, that is to say not significantly different from the proportion of equiprobability for reference to cognitive-developmental and learning processes.

Correlations and Multiple Regressions The intercorrelation matrix presented in Table 2 showed that, as predicted by Hypothesis A, internal control beliefs were positively correlated with distancing


strategies, but a correlation of the same magnitude was found for internal control beliefs and directive strategies. Contrary to what was predicted by Hypothesis B, control beliefs by powerful others were not significantly correlated with directive strategies. As predicted by Hypothesis C, agreement with nature’s contribution to development correlated negatively with distancing and directive strategies, but the correlation was significant only for directive strategies. It appeared furthermore that distancing and directive strategies tended to be positively correlated (r = .35, p = .09).

Two unexpected correlations appeared. The proportion of cognitive-developmental processes and distancing strategies which, according to Hypothesis E, were expected to be positively correlated tended, in fact, to be negatively correlated; knowledge on play was negatively though not significantly correlated with distancing strategies. Furthermore, agreement for the contribution of nurture to the child’s development and knowledge on play were negatively and significantly correlated.

Given that, contrary to what was expected, directive and distancing strategies tended to be correlated, and that internal control was equally correlated with both, an aggregated measure, mean educational action was calculated as the mean of distancing strategies and directive strategies. It appeared that the correlation for internal control beliefs and mean educational action was more significant than the correlation considering distancing or directive strategies separately. The difference however was not significant.

To verify further the hypotheses referring to the relation between control beliefs and beliefs about development and education and educational action, distinct stepwise multiple regressions (SAS; maximum R* improvement) were performed for each of the three measures of educational action: distancing strategies, directive strategies, and mean educational action. The three different variables referring to control beliefs and the four variables referring to beliefs about development and education were entered as independent variables.

Results are presented in Table 3. For each predicted variable, the results of the regression explaining the highest percentage of variance with significant predictors @ < . 10) are reported for the different steps.

For each of the three measures of educational action, internal control beliefs enter the regression in the first step. For directive strategies as a predicted variable, no other variable enters the regression and the percentage of explained variance remains relatively low. For distancing strategies, the percentage of explained variance is considerably higher and the agreement with nurture’s contribution to development and knowledge on play enter the regression as additional significant negative predictors. For mean educational action, the percentage of explained variance is slightly higher than for distancing strategies. Agreement with nature’s contribution to the child’s development and the proportion of cognitive-developmental processes enter the regressions as additional significant negative predictors.

TAB

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2 3

4 1

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Co

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Bel

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Ch

ance

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0.17

0.

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0.47

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46”

0.56

**

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40x

0.09

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34

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0.24

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16

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2 0.

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-

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TABLE 3 Multiple Regressions Between Control Beliefs, Beliefs About Develoment

and Education, and Educational Action

Distancing Strategies Step 1 Step 2 Step 3

P RI. 23) p F(2. 23) P FI3.23)

Intercept


0.97 0.35

1.11 6.24’ 1.16 7.62**

Beliefs About Development and Education

Nature Nurture Knowledge on play Proportion of

cognitive-developmental processes

-0.69 3.61(*)

R’J .23* .34**

Directive Strategies Step 1 Step 2

9.41

1.04 6.92*

-0.77 4.49* -1.07 7.82**

.46**

Step 3

P Fh 23) P FE. 23) P F(3.23)

Intercept -2.75

Control Beliefs Internal 1.56 5.88* Powerful others Chance Beliefs About Development

and Education Nature Nurture Knowledge on play Proportion of

cognitive-developmental processes

R2 .21*

continued


TABLE 3 Continued

Mean Educational Action Step 1 Step 2 Step 3

P F(1,23) (3 FE. 23) (3 F(3, 23)

Intercept


-0.88 10.97 5.85

1.34 10.08** 0.82 3.56(*)

Beliefs About Development and Education

Nature Nurture Knowledge on play Proportion of cognitive- developmental

processes

-1.10 8.33** -0.85 4.87”

-4.86 7.89** -3.43 3.64(*)

R* .31** .39** .48**

(“)p < .lO. *p < .05. **p < .Ol. ***p < .OOl

In sum, for directive strategies, the percent of variance explained is the lowest and internal control beliefs are the only predictor. For distancing strategies and for mean educational action, the percent of variance is fairly high. Depending on whether distancing strategies or mean educational action are considered as predicted variables, the variables entering the regression at the second and the third step are different: agreement with nurture’s contribution to development and knowledge on play for distancing strategies; agreement with nature’s contribution to development and the proportion of cognitive-developmental process for mean educational action. Control beliefs in powerful others and chance never enter the regression for either of the measures.

DISCUSSION

Descriptive Measures The results of the descriptive measures are consistent with the hypotheses of this study and with previous research. Numerous studies have shown that participants score higher on internal than on external control (Dubois, 1987; Leyens, 1983). Moreover the teachers’ higher agreement with the contribution of nurture to the child’s development than with nature’s contribution is similar to Miller et al.‘s (1980) and Kochanska et al.‘s (1987) results. Finally, the fact that teachers used


more distancing than directive strategies is due, in part, to the building block situation in which the objectives were very broad and which did not elicit a predetermined outcome from the children.

Correlation Matrix and Multiple Regressions The hypotheses referring to the relations between control beliefs and educational action were only partially confirmed. Hypothesis A that internal control would predict distancing strategies was confirmed, as emerges from the correlation matrix and the multiple regressions. Hypothesis B that control by powerful others would predict directive educational action was however not confirmed. Further evidenced was that internal control beliefs predicted directive strategies to the same degree as distancing strategies, and distancing and directive strategies tended to be intercorrelated. Considered together, the control beliefs and beliefs about development and education account for a very high proportion of the variance of educational action in the present study, whereas previous studies on the relation between educational beliefs and action resulted only in meager

results (Miller, 1988). These results need some qualification. The correlation between distancing and

directive strategies that tends to be significant can be understood from considerations referring both to the nature of the play situation, teachers’ cognitions about developmental and educational processes, and specific considerations of the indicators used to rate distancing and directive strategies. On the one hand, the nature of the play materials used and the format of the situation-no specific outcomes were expected neither for the teacher nor for the children-solicited distancing strategies. On the other hand, when teachers were asked questions during the interview referring to their beliefs about development and education, they referred to biological-maturational processes, to processes concerning cognitive-developmental theories, and to processes referring to learning theories. Because learning theories are the conceptual basis for directive strategies, it is not surprising that a fair amount of directive action has also been observed. Furthermore, the tendency for distancing and directive strategies to be intercorrelated represents a general tendency to be actively involved in the play situation. Finally, the reference to number, size, and color of the building blocks and of the children’s constructions were considered as distancing strategies if used in the interrogative mode and as directive strategies if used in the declarative mode. These different considerations explain that internal control beliefs are correlated with both types of strategies.

A further analysis revealed that the results nevertheless are mixed for some of the relations between beliefs about development and education and educational action. Hypothesis C that agreement with nature’s contribution to the child’s development would negatively predict educational action was confirmed, as emerges from the correlation matrix and the multiple regression in which mean educational action was used as the predicted variable. Knowledge on play, the


proportion of cognitive-developmental processes and, to a certain degree, agreement with the contribution of nurture to the child’s development appeared unex- pectedly as negatively correlated with one or the other operationalization of educational action and one or the other appeared as a negative predictor in one of the multiple regressions. These unexpected findings need some clarification.

A detailed inspection of the operational indicators for beliefs referring to cognitive-developmental processes and distancing strategies sheds some light on the negative relation between beliefs and action. Cognitive-developmental beliefs were operationalized by references to the child’s action, to peer interaction, and to the teacher’s discrete and occasional child-centered educational action; that is to say, to situations in which the teacher is not or is only minimally involved. Contrarily, when rating the teachers’ distancing strategies, the judges focused only on the teachers’ actions directly addressed to the children. It is evidenced, then, that, although both variables-cognitive-developmentally oriented beliefs and distancing strategies-rely on cognitive-developmental con- structs, the first refers minimally to the teachers’ action, whereas the second relies heavily on it. If a correlation between beliefs referring to cognitive- developmental processes is expected in future studies, teachers’ beliefs in different developmental and educational processes should be solicited in a way more congruent with educational action.

At first sight, the negative, although not significant correlation between agreement with the contribution of nurture to the child’s development and educational action, especially distancing strategies which appears in the correlation matrix, and the fact that the same variable is a negative predictor when distancing strategies are the predicted variable seems puzzling. Indeed, the teachers’ action is one of the constituents of nurture. In their rating of the nurture statement, the teachers may have referred mainly to the sociocultural constraints on development as opposed to their own educational action.

As Stevens (in Miller, 1988) found a positive correlation between mothers’ knowledge on children’s development and their educational action, the negative correlation between the teachers’ knowledge on play and their educational action, especially for distancing strategies, appearing in this study is puzzling. It may certainly be argued that this study concerned European teachers, whereas Stevens’s study concerned American mothers some of which were teenagers. More stringently, however, the negative correlation found in this study may be explained by the “autoscopic shock’ (Linard & Prax, 1984; Wagner, 1988) that results when persons are confronted with their own image. Doerr and Carr’s (1982) study is particularly relevant to this issue. Adult participants were first given questionnaires on their self-perception and the perception they thought others had of them. They were then confronted with videotapes which had been made of themselves while responding to a structured interview concerning their social skills. Finally, the questionnaires were readministered. Between pre- and posttest, a greater congruency between self as seen by self and self as seen by


others occurred. This concept of congruency may apply to the teachers’ situation in the following way. When viewing the videorecordings prior to the interview, teachers may have closely monitored their interaction with the children. It may be supposed that they compared the amount of their educational action with that they supposed characteristic of an ideal teacher interacting frequently with the children. Some teachers may have considered that their educational action was low as compared to that which would have been displayed by this ideal teacher. When asked in which way the building block situation could contribute to the children’s development, these teachers could have tried to compensate for their low level of educational action by trying to appear highly knowledgeable in the experimenter’s and the researcher’s eyes. Other teachers on the contrary, having implemented a high level of educational action, would not have felt the need for this compensation, proposing only a few items referring to their knowledge on play. This post hoc explanation is stimulating and should be verified in future studies.

In conclusion, the results of the three multiple regressions show that internal control beliefs are the most powerful predictor of educational action because they appear as a predictor for the three measures of educational action, whereas the other educational beliefs, contributions of nature and nurture to the child’s development, knowledge on play, and beliefs in cognitive-developmental processes, each only appear in one of the regressions. Furthermore, internal control beliefs enter in the first step into the regression. The results of this study thus confirm the importance of internal control for educational action, as was demonstrated in Stevens’s (1988) study with mothers and, to some extent, in Mielke’s (1979) study with teachers.

Because internal control beliefs were most highly correlated with mean educational action, because the expected negative relation between agreement with nature’s contribution to the child’s development and educational action was only significant for mean educational action, and because the negative relation between the proportion of cognitive-developmental processes is the most easily interpretable, the consideration of internal control beliefs, of agreement with nature’s contribution to the child’s development, and of the proportion of cognitive-developmental processes as powerful predictors of educational action aggregated from distancing and directive strategies best accounts for the data gathered in this study. Future studies should consequently also assess educational action multidimensionally, but its dimensions should not be considered separately. These considerations are in line with Rushton, Brainerd, and Pressley’s (1983) recommendations on aggregated measures.

The study that has been described has brought forth some interesting results. It has however to be stressed that the study is exploratory and is endowed by this fact with several weaknesses. The sample was small, but nevertheless a fair amount of statistical tests have been conducted. Nature’s and nurture’s contribution to the child’s development have each been assessed with a single item. Due


to practical differences which accompanied data collection, it was not possible to repeat the videorecordings and test-retest reliability coefficients are not available for “knowledge of play” scores and the score referring to the proportion of cognitive-developmental processes. Finally, the regression analyses which have been used do not allow statements about the causal direction between the variables, especially between internal control and the measures of educational action. Future studies should compensate for these deficiencies.

Implications for Teacher Training This study has nevertheless many implications for teacher pre- or in-service training. Some of the teachers who served as participants participated in a half- day training session. After they had been familiarized with the criteria for the content analysis as it had been implemented by the researcher, they were given the typescript of an interview and asked to code some prototypical statements. The teachers were also presented some of the quantitative results of the study. After the most important measures used in the study had been described, they were asked to anticipate the direction of the results. Their anticipations were then confronted with the results obtained in the study. Some prototypical excerpts of the videorecordings were also shown to the teachers, analyzed, and commented.

The teachers participated actively in the training session and were particularly alive to the possibility that the results of the study could enhance the positive image that parents, political decisionmakers and teachers themselves had of the difficult task of teaching young children.

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APPENDIX

Indicators for Rating Distancing Strategies The teacher stimulates the cognitive abilities of the children. She asks them to think by

themselves without proposing ready-made solutions. She addresses questions to the chil-


dren, involves them in symbolic play, or both. This involvement has not to be performed in an interrogative fornr.

addresses general questions to the children: “What did you do?” “What do you have in your hands?“; asks questions concerning number, size, color of the building blocks, or the children’s constructions: “What color are these?“; suggests an action in an interrogative form: “Are we going shopping?“; suggests reasoning in order to solve a problem: “What could you do so that the two pillars stick together?” “You lie down in order to pass under a bridge” ; and asks questions referring to the story the child has figured out and inserts the child’s construction into a symbolic play context: “What’s the name of your little guy? ” “Where do you go? ” “He fell in the staircase?“.

Indicators for Rating Directive Strategies Control techniques are defined as actions used by a person to change the course of

action of another person. Their function is to canalize the action into a certain direction by inhibiting certain tendencies and by stimulating others. The indicators stress the fact that the teacher canalizes the action into a certain direction.

1. Verbal Prohibitive Order l gives a direct prohibitive order: “Stop; don’t do this”. “Do not break’

this” ; l gives an indirect prohibitive order: “Pay attention. You’re going to make

them fall” ; l in the imperative form, suggests another activity than the one the child is

engaged in; l explains a prohibition; and l in a reproving tone, asks questions concerning a certain action: “Hey,

what are you doing there?” 2. Nonverbal Prohibitive Order

l withdraws the child from a situation or refrains him or her; and l withdraws an object from the child’s hands.

3. Directive Order: Action Control l suggests an action to the child: “You can do this, like that”; and l suggests that the child exchanges his or her construction with another

child: “Zf you give her your little guy, you will have her dog.” 4. Focalizing Attention

l directs the child’s attention to the construction of another child: “Look at Peter’s; it rolls” ; and

l waves, points to, or manipulates an object.


5. Modeling l suggests a model, with or without accompanying verbal statements: “I

would do it like that.” 6. Participation in the Child’s Construction

l adds one or several blocks to what the child has constructed. 7. Control of the Child’s Access to the Building Blocks or the Constructed

Objects l brings an object closer to the child; and l moves the child.

8. Verbal reference to number, size, color of the building blocks, or the children’s constructions in a declarative mode: “Zt is a green car.”

9. Praise “It’s nice. ” “A ball. A good idea.”