Teachers’ Beliefs, Classroom Atmosphere and Student Behavior

Abstract

ness of teachers' belief systems affect their overt resourcefulness, dictatorialness and punitiveness in the classroom. In addition, the results show that the classroom behavior of the teacher and the behavior of the students are significantly related. Clearly, this relationship does not tell us the nature of the causality. Theoretically, the teacher's behavior could determine the childrens' behavior, the reverse could be true, both could be determined by a third factor, such as the organizational climate, or the effects could be produced by the interaction among all of these factors. The possibility that the relationship between teachers' and students' behavior is a result of organizational climate is minimized by the fact that the concrete and abstract teachers, while selected from the same organizational climates, nevertheless differed markedly in their classroom behaviors, as did their students. Further, while students no doubt affect the behavior of their teachers, it appears more likely that, because of her socially prescribed power, her influence is greater and more direct than theirs. The obtained differences between concrete and abstract teachers probably would have been accentuated had the group of more abstract teachers been comprised only of clear instances of System 4. Instead unclear instances, together with cases of System 3, were combined with clear instances of System 4 to constitute the abstract group in this study. Yet, if our experiences from the earlier (Harvey, and others, 1966) and the present study are typical, a large sample of teachers would be necessary to yield an adequate number of clear cases of System 4. Of the 292 teachers to whom