Identifying Exemplary Science Teachers Through Their Classroom Interactions with Students

The purpose of the study described in this paper was to use the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) to identify and describe exemplary science teachers. With a sample of over 493 science students, the reliability of the QTI scales ranged from 0.69–0.87. The exemplary teachers were identified as those whose students' perceptions were more than one standard deviation above the mean on the scales of Leadership, Helping/Friendly, and Understanding and more than one standard deviation below the mean on the Uncertain, Dissatisfied and Admonishing scales. The construct validity of the QTI to identify these exemplary teachers was confirmed through interviews with students and these views are reported in the article. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.