MEASUREMENT OF INFLUENCE OF THE TEACHER'S PERSONALITY ON STUDENTS IN THE CLASSROOM

Abstract

The focus of this research is the assessment of pedagogical interaction as a dimension of the learning environment through the personal representation of a teacher in the student's personality, and the assessment of the nature and extent to which teachers are involved in changes of interpersonal dimensions of their student's personality. This was examined by the assessment of the shift in egograms of a teacher's students, as measured by the Interpersonal Check List (ICL). A 2 × 9 doubly multivariate repeated measures analysis of variance was conducted on the adult, parent, and child ego states as self-assessed by 187 students prior to the class period and after the class period, but still within the presence of the teacher. As hypothesized, the Time and the Class by Time results were statistically significant (p < .05), indicating a general preclass to postclass change in ego state. The multivariate effect sizes averaged about .065, which is subtle but detectible. The change in ego states were also significant (p = 0.018) when assessed by a singly-ordered row by column table, in terms of the number of students within each class who presented either an increase or decrease in the number of items representative of the Adult, Parent, or Child ego states on the ICL. The shift in ego state was also evidenced by the decrease (average Spearman's rho = .45) in pre-post correlation (i.e., with the teacher in the classroom), as compared with test-retest (i.e., study hall with no teacher present) correlation (average rho of .86) of ego states.