Facet design and smallest space analysis of teachers' instructional behavior

Abstract The essence of research in the behavioral sciences is to help in forming theories that will enhance understanding of behavior. In this study an attempt is made to construct such a theory of students' perceptions of their teachers' instructional behaviors and to verify it by empirical evidence. Guttman's definition of a theory was adopted here: “An hypothesis of a correspondence between a definitional system for a universe of observation and an aspect of the empirical structure of those observations, together with a rationale for such an hypothesis” (Shye, 1978). Data was collected through a questionnaire administered to two thousand highschool students. Facet design and smallest space analysis (SSA) were used to construct a theory that was then verified by empirical evidence. The results are consistent with previous studies done by Bar-On (Bar-On & Perlberg, 1976; Klinging & Bar-On, 1975) which employed also facet design and smallest space analysis.