The purpose of this study was to investigate teachers'
irrational beliefs and their implications. The first part of
this study was to develop an instrument to measure teachers'
irrational beliefs. Based on Ellis' Rational -Emotive Therapy
(RET), the instrument (i.e. Teacher's Beliefs Inventory,TBI)
composed of ten sub-scales , two factor-scales and a full-
scale. The TBI showed internal consistency of Cronbach'sα=.501
∼.754, Pearson -Brown's split-half reliability γ=.9541,
Pearson's Coefficient of stability γ=.8237, and also provided
high construct validity. There were 4,350 usable responses with
a 72.5% acceptable samples received from the survey of the
target teachers. The results of teachers' irrational beliefs
indicated that female teachers showed higher irrational beliefs
than male teachers and married teachers showed lower irrational
beliefs than the unmarried ones. Older and experienced teachers
are less irrational than the young, inexperienced ones.
Teachers with master or doctorate degree had more irrational
beliefs than other educational background teachers. The
irrational beliefs of "high self-esteem" , "proneness to blame"
, "dependency" , "importance of the past" showed significant
negative correlation with good teacher's attitudes. There were
no significant relationship between teachers and students
irrational beliefs. Higher teachers' irrational beliefs
significantly performed more teachers' behavior of "direct
teachers influences" than "indirect teachers influences". The
students taught by teachers with higher irrational beliefs got
lower "satisfaction perception" than the students taught by
teachers with less irrational beliefs. Limitations of the
current study and its implications for future research were
discussed.