Reliability and Construct Validity of a Discrepancy Approach to Measuring Student Perceptions of Teaching. Document No. 0874-01.

The discrepancy approach, with a nonmonotonic function, was used in a questionnaire designed to measure the difference between reality as perceived and desires. Reality is described as a student's perception of teacher performance and notion of an ideal teacher performance. The questionnaire deals with both the intensity and direction of a student's dissatisfaction with his/her teacher. An experiment, utilizing 1,059 students from 52 classes in seven different French colleges, was designed to measure the construct validity of this questionnaire. Results are presented in tables entitled: (1) Content descriptions, means and standard deviations of five constructs for each of 15 items, as well as the percentage of excess discrepancies; (2) Precision coefficients for a direct measure of dissatisfaction and for four constructs associated with a derived measure of dissatisfaction; (3) Observed correlations between five constructs used in the derived approach and direct measure of the satisfaction-dissatisfaction continuum; (4) Corelations for reliability attenuation; and (5) Observed mean within groups correlations between four constructs used in the derivation procedure and a direct measure of the satisfaction-dissatisfaction continuum. It is concluded that desires should be thought of as a continuum with limits being respectively the ideal and the minimally acceptable. (BJG)