A percepção dos alunos do comportamento comunicativo do professor de ciências

Abstract

This research describes a cross-validation of the Teacher Communication Behavior Questionnaire (TCBQ) (She & Fisher, 2000) among a sample of Brazilian students. The mentioned questionnaire was originally developed in Australia and Taiwan. The TCBQ measures students perceptions of science teachers communication behavior and has five scales: Challenging, Encouragement and Praise, Non-verbal Support, Understanding and Friendly, and Controlling. After a back translation of the TCBQ English version to Portuguese, validity evidence of the content of the scales was obtained through student interviews. The TCBQ was applied to 414 students from grade 9, from thirteen classrooms of five schools in Belo Horizonte, two of which were public and three private. The reliability of the internal consistency was satisfactory for all the scales. Confirmatory Factor Analysis performed to examine the dimensionality of the TCBQ scales indicated that the Challenging scale provided the fittest model in compliance with the studied fit indexes. The results convey the requirement of further researching on the dimensionality of the TCBQ. Additional analyses indicated that boys rather than girls perceived their teachers as passing more encouragement and praise. Furthermore, Biology students were found to have a more positive perception of their teachers than Physics students, and private school students perceived their teachers more favorably than did public school ones. Last, students were found to have a more positive perception of their female teachers. Key words: Students perception, Classroom learning environment, Science education.