Over the last decades teacher-student relationships plaid an important role in educational studies (Fisher, D. L., Fraser, B., & Cresswell. J., 1995; Telli, Den Brok, & Cakiroglu, 2007; Wei, Den Brok, & Zhou., 2009; Maulana, Opdenakker, Den Brok, & Bosker, 2012; Sivan, Dennis, Chan, & Kwan, 2014). To conceptualize these relationships from an interpersonal perspective, Wubbels (Wubbels, Créton, & Hooymayers, 1985) adapted Leary’s research on the interpersonal diagnosis of personality (Leary, 1957) to the educational context, and developed the interpersonal circle for the teacher, the IPC-T (also known as the Model of Interpersonal teacher behavior or MITB) (Wubbels & Levy, 1993). Based on this circle and it’s eight octants, representing prototypical teacher behaviors, the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) was created to measure teacher-student interpersonal relationships by tapping students’ interpersonal perceptions of their teachers. The items correspond to the eight sectors which are often summarized in terms of two interpersonal dimensions underlying the interpersonal circle: agency (or control or power) and communion (or warmth or affiliation) (Wubbels, et al. 2012). The QTI was originally Dutch and consisted of 77 items (Wubbels, Créton & Hooymayers, 1985), and a 64-item American version was constructed in 1988 (Wubbels & Levy, 1991). Since then the QTI has been translated and revised into several other languages (Wubbels, et al. 2006) and research with the QTI has been conducted in a number of countries. However, some QTI adaptations were not as thorough as might have been possible and usually involved straightforward translations without considering unique language and cultural aspects, which heightened the risk of misunderstanding caused by variation in the interpretation of similar words in different languages (Wubbels et al., 2012).

Several Studies have been conducted on the reliability and validity of the QTI. The Dutch and US/Australian versions were developed after several pilot administrations and analyses (Wubbels & Levy, 1993). Employing a similar process the Turkish (Telli, et al., 2007) and Indonesian versions (Maulana, et al., 2012) were developed. In China, a mandarin version was developed and applied in the southwest region to measure the perceptions of students from ethnic minority groups in EFL classrooms (Wei, et al., 2009), and a psychometric evaluation of the traditional Chinese version was performed later in Hong Kong (Sivan, et al., 2014). But none of these studies had a representative sample of Chinese classrooms. More importantly, a close inspection of the questionnaire suggests that item formulation is not completely adequate and might be largely improved for better student understanding and appropriate content and meaning.

The present research aims to develop an improved Chinese version of the QTI by looking for sound cultural localized grounding. In a Carefully planned process in Chinese classrooms, including extensive interviews, a pilot administration, a broad questionnaire completion with both teachers and students, and repeated revisions, the new version was developed aiming for satisfactory psychometric properties and (face) validity. Psychometric properties include sufficient internal consistencies for each scale, as well as a pattern of scale correlations that correspond to the circumplex nature of the IPC-T. These properties will be compared between Turkey, The Netherlands and China. The questionnaire will be utilized in future studies to evaluate students’ and teachers’ perception of teacher-student interpersonal relationships in secondary education in China and compare these with earlier European results.

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