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Research Article

Measuring Thinking Styles of Pre-service and Early Career Teachers: Validation of a Revised Inventory

Zheng Li , Bing Li

The early phase is the decisive period for the teachers’ career. Intellectual styles (particularly thinking styles) play a vital role in teacher.

T

The early phase is the decisive period for the teachers’ career. Intellectual styles (particularly thinking styles) play a vital role in teachers’ professional development. With the purpose of measuring thinking styles of teachers at the early phase, this study was designed to validate a revised inventory of thinking styles (TSI-R2) for pre-service and early career teachers. A sample of pre-service teachers (n = 248) were invited to join the pilot study and a sample of teachers with one year work experience (n = 252) participated in the main study. Exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis were performed. The results suggested that with slight modification, TSI-R2 was a reliable and valid instrument to measure thinking styles of pre-service teachers and early career teachers, which has some implications to enhancing teacher education and development.

Keywords: Early career teachers, pre-service teachers, thinking styles, validation.

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