Who's in charge? The history and future of teacher learning orientation measures

Abstract

Education grapples with two essential orientations to instruction: teacher-centered and student-centered; each has important strengths and weaknesses for children's learning. This narrative review concerns how these two learning orientations (LOs) have been measured in research by examining 75 years of Likert scale LO measures. Candidate instruments were identified through iterative database and reference-list searches, and were retained if they used a Likert scale format, applied to teaching generally rather than a specific subject, yielded scores for exactly two orientations, had undergone formal scale development, and had been used by researchers other than the scale's developer. Fifteen instruments met these criteria. We organize them into five dominant perspectives or theoretical frameworks: progressivism, teacher control and student autonomy, developmental, constructivism, and teacher/student-centered and -oriented. A central observation is that measures differ in whether they treat teacher- and student-oriented beliefs as opposite ends of a single continuum or as orthogonal, potentially coexisting constructs; we argue the latter framing may better capture teachers’ belief systems and better accommodate instruction that blends structure and autonomy. By summarizing instruments and their psychometric properties, this review offers researchers a comprehensive reference for selecting measures of these constructs, as well as context for developing new measures.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Frontiers in Education, 2026 · DOI ↗