A Comparative Study of Israeli and Greek Teachers’ Educational Beliefs

This article reports on a comparative empirical study, which was conducted to gain insight into the nature and structure of primary school teachers’ education-related beliefs. The sample was drawn from two Mediterranean countries ‐ Israel and Greece. An anonymous Education Beliefs of Teachers Questionnaire (EBTQ) was built particularly for this study based on the Kerlinger and Kaya (1959) quantitative conceptual framework, and it was completed by 256 Israeli and 314 Greek teachers. Results suggest that two dimensions are required to subsume teachers’ beliefs: traditionalism (conservatism) and progressivism. They also revealed that the predictive factors mainly explaining the differences among teachers’ educational beliefs are ethnicity, gender and discipline taught from the part of Israeli sample and specialization, teaching experience and teachers’ studies in the Greek case.