TEACHER BELIEFS AND BELIEF REPORTS: WHY THE

DIFFERENCE REALLY MATTERS

Alfredo Gaete
Presented at EDULEARN13, Barcelona, July 1-3, 2013

Abstract
The concept of belief has become one of the most important concepts in contemporary education. No
wonder, since peoples beliefs are normally taken to be highly influential upon their behavior and,
consequently, the last two or three decades have witnessed a wealth of studies concerned with
identifying what teachers, student teachers, and teacher educators believe about a wide variety of
issues. Most of these studies assume that it is relatively unproblematic to determine what subjects
believe in virtue of what they say they believe. On this understanding, the procedures and instruments
used to identify beliefs are based upon belief reports: interviews, Likert-type scales, questionnaires,
etc. In this work I argue that the assumption in question is mistaken and, therefore, we better reinterpret recent educational research on beliefs as revealing information not necessarily about the
beliefs of teachers and other educational agents but about the stories they tell about what they
believe. I also suggest some alternative procedures for identifying beliefs that are not based upon
belief reports. My point is that if we are interested in what educational agents really believe rather than
in what they claim to believe, these alternative procedures seem far more appropriate or, in fact, valid.
Keywords: Beliefs, teacher beliefs, belief reports.

INTRODUCTION

The concept of belief has become one of the most important concepts in
contemporary education (see [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]). There is nothing surprising
about this. After all, peoples beliefs are normally taken to be highly influential upon
their behavior. What the teacher does to teach, what the student does and is ready to
learn, what the teacher educator talks about during her lecture, her very giving of a
lecture rather than her doing of something else all this depends, to some extent, on
what these people believe about such things as teaching, learning, knowledge, the
subject-matter in question, ones own and others personal efficacy, the goals of
education, and a myriad of other issues. Consequently, the last three decades have
witnessed a wealth of studies concerned with identifying beliefs like these.
Now in most of these studies it is assumed, often implicitly, that it is relatively
unproblematic for one to get to know what a person believes by means of asking her
to tell one what she believes. In words of Alexander and Docky [1], who have made
this assumption explicit: [W]e assumed that the responses that participants shared
would be accurate reflections of their thoughts and views (p. 416). On this
understanding, the procedures and instruments that the great majority of the studies
use to identify beliefs are based upon different sorts of belief reports: interviews,
Likert-type scales, questionnaires, and so on (see e.g., [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13],
[14], [15], [16], [17], [18]). In this work I argue that the assumption in question is
mistaken; more specifically, that under certain conditions which commonly obtain in
educational research to ask people to say what their beliefs are is not the best way
to know what they actually believe. Even though this strategy might work, there are, I
contend, many (relevant) contexts in which it is a particularly feeble procedure. I also
suggest where to look in order to find alternative procedures.

GETTING SERIOUS

In 1995, Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin [19] declared that it is frightening to

think that social science is in the hands of professionals who are so deaf to human
nuance that they believe that people do not lie to themselves about the most
freighted aspects of their own lives (p. 184). What motivated this remark was a study
about sexual practices in the United States, in which the authors used a
questionnaire in order to get (scientific) knowledge of peoples sexual life.
Reasonably, not only Lewontin but many others were quite worried about the quality
of scholarship of the study and, what is more important, of social science. For
someone forgot to tell these researchers what they should have already known,
namely, that most people lie about such subjects as ones own sexuality and,
furthermore, those who are sincere may be lying to themselves anyway.
Not that peoples reports of, say, what they believe about teaching and learning are
exactly as unreliable as those of their sexual doings and undoings. Still, they may
and do have reasons to hide their thoughts to others and to themselves.
Acknowledging part of this story, some implement measures to detect liars; for
example, consistency criteria. But even if these measures succeeded, those who are
not sincere to themselves continue to pass undetected.
Moreover, these two kinds of dishonesty are just two of several factors that make
peoples avowals a defective source of information. Take, for instance, the fact that
the items of most, if not all, questionnaires are inevitably ambiguous. I say inevitably
in order to immediately discard any reply to the effect that test makers are very
careful in designing the items so as to avoid misinterpretation. For on top of the fact
that natural languages are inexorably ambiguous, no matter how many efforts are
made to achieve precision the level of ambiguity skyrockets when one has to talk
about such things as teaching or knowledge or the goals of education, especially in
the context of a Likert scale and the like. What does a teacher really mean, for
example, when she says that she agrees that poverty is a major obstacle for
learning? How exactly does this belief differ from the belief expressed by those who
mark the strongly agree option? Is it a difference in the degree of certainty or in the
likelihood one would hold it, or act upon it, or even die for it? Or is it that one
respondent takes poverty to be a major obstacle, whereas the other takes it to be a
minor one? And what exactly do they mean by poverty and obstacle? Are they
even talking about the same phenomena? Is the researcher?
Consider, also, that certain subject matters are rather difficult to talk about and many
people are not quite good at providing accurate verbalizations of their thoughts. If you
ask them in a questionnaire, or even in a brief interview, what they believe, say,
about the scientific status of evolutionary theory, or about the concept of knowledge,
their best attempt to an answer may be a pale reflex of what they really believe. A
longer interview might fare well in some cases, but in too many others it just will not.
Some beliefs require several conversations to be clearly expressed, and some
require more than mere conversation.
So there are too many ways in which the standard strategy of asking for belief
reports can go wrong. If we are going to get serious about detecting peoples beliefs,
we need to do better than this and as I see it we must get serious. We are talking

about one of the chief research fields in education nowadays. We are talking about
thousands of studies whose recollections of data miss the point. And we are talking
about the accurateness and the reputation of education and social science in
general.
3

TWO MOTIVATIONS FOR NOT GETTING SERIOUS

Before I suggest some alternative ways to detect beliefs, I would like to mention a
couple of circumstances that make it tempting not to get serious and, therefore,
that can explain, at least in part, why the standard strategy has been so widespread.
One is a pragmatic reason, namely, that questionnaires, Likert scales, and the like
are relatively cheap, quick, and easy to apply. So it would be really great if they
worked. We stick to them either because of wishful thinking or because we have no
more money or because we want immediate results or because of a combination of
reasons of this sort. Not very good reasons, of course: if we wanted to measure
temperature, we would not trade a thermometer for a stone, even if the latter is
cheaper; nor should rapidity make us prefer a faulty calculator over an abacus. I live
in this world and can understand that researchers usually do not have all of the
resources they would need. But so far as I can see this should lead us to rethink
certain public policies rather than to do bad science.
This turns us to the other temptation I want to mention. It is the temptation of
conflating good science, or being serious, with using quantitative methods. This old
way of understanding science is fortunately outdated among most philosophers of
science and many scientists, but somehow it continues to exert a great influence
among educational psychologists and other researchers concerned with educational
studies. Perhaps this is so because, as Harding [20] suggested two decades ago,
although fewer scientists, philosophers, and social scientists who model their work
on the natural sciences are as openly enthusiastic about positivism than was the
case forty and more years ago, most of these people still happily embrace
fundamental assumptions of positivism (p. 79). For positivism inherited from early
modern scientists and philosophers the view that, to use Ryles [21] way of putting it,
a scientific theory has no place in it for terms which cannot appear among the data
or the results of calculations (p. 82).
At any rate, some researchers, possessed by the idea that any serious scientific
endeavour must include at some point the consideration of numbers, tend to accept
and even demand the use of questionnaires, Likert-type scales, and other
instruments that provide us with quantifiable information. It would be otiose to deploy
here an attack against this idea, especially because solid arguments have been
advanced against the alleged primacy of the quantity ever since at least the second
half of the past century (see, e.g., [21]) and, so far as I know, nobody has been able
to answer back in any satisfactory fashion. Being serious or scientific does not
necessarily involve being numerical. What it does involve is being careful in the
procedures we follow to collect information. No matter how convenient the request of
a verbal report may be in terms of costs and velocity, it is not convenient in terms of
accurateness and this is everything we need to reject it as a scientific procedure
(for detecting beliefs of the sort in question).

THE SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVE PROCEDURES

Where to look, then, for alternatives to the standard strategy? Not in places so far
away from education. Both psychology after Freud and anthropology after Malinowski
offer some options, produced precisely because these two thinkers made it quite
difficult to keep thinking that our talk about what we believe is always representative
of what we really believe (see, e.g., [22], [23]). I myself am not very fond of
psychoanalytic methods, but many post-Freudian psychotherapists working outside
the psychoanalytic framework have developed and used different ways of accessing
peoples mental states by doing something else than merely analyzing what they say
about such states. For example, they focus on how they say it and also on the way
they act or tend to act, whether or not they acknowledge that they act that way. In
other words, they observe peoples actions. It is by so doing that they can see what
someone believes or wants or hopes or fears (etc.) even if the person herself cannot.
Social anthropologists learned the lesson too. So they decided to renounce
questionnaires, or at least to keep them under control, and put their chips on
observation normally either participant observation or ethnography (or both). True,
the strategy is neither cheap nor rapid nor quantitative. You need to invest in wellqualified observers who may spend a whole year making observations, none of
which will be translated into numbers. But the thing is that this is exactly what we
may need if we are interested in knowing what teachers believe about their students,
or about their practices and ultimate goals, or about a wide variety of other issues.
Some recent studies have incorporated observational procedures, but they still hinge
too much on interviews (see, e.g., [26], [27], [28]). There is no doubt that a series of
deep conversations can be more telling of a persons beliefs than a battery of
questionnaires, partly because the former involve a good deal of behaviour
observation (voice tones, facial expressions, emotional reactions, bodily postures,
etc.). My suggestion, however, is that more efforts should be made to capture people
in the very process of expressing their beliefs through their doings. In this arena, an
action is usually worth a thousand words.
5

FINAL REMARKS

I hope that my criticism of the standard strategy to measure beliefs is not

understood as intending to deny that we can learn something about current
educational research on beliefs. But we better re-interpret it as revealing information
not necessarily about the beliefs of teachers and other educational agents, but about
the stories they tell about what they believe. There is indeed much to learn about
such stories. My point is that if we are interested in what educational agents believe
(rather than what they claim to believe) then alternative procedures like the ones I
have hinted at seem far more appropriate.
All in all, what is in question is the validity of the instruments or procedures we use
and, consequently, of the conclusions we draw. It is just as serious as that. A study
tells us that on a certain issue students tend to change their mind from one month to
the other. Right. But is it that they change their mind or simply that they say different

things? Until we have one or more procedures that go beyond the limitations of the
report-based strategy, this question will inevitably remain unanswered.
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