Students’ perceptions of their mathematics teachers in the longitudinal study of American youth (Lsay): A factor analytic approach

Abstract

This study investigated the psychometric properties of questionnaire items used to measure students’ perceptions of mathematics teachers in the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY) during middle school. The perceptions of students regarding their math teachers were gathered through 16 questions. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded the LSAY and the questionnaire is a collaboration work of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER), Department of Education and Training and Wallies Consulting Group. The dataset was randomly split into two samples so that exploratory analyses could be conducted on one-half of the sample and confirmatory analyses could be conducted on the second half. One item, “teacher encourages extra work”, was removed from the questionnaire after analyses, due to low loading and ambiguous meaning. Four factors were extracted under different methods of extraction within oblique rotations and were named by the author are: Teachers Characteristics, Teacher Instructional Expectations, Teacher Fairness and Teacher Focus on Outcomes.