Teachers’ Judgments about Ethical Violations Survey

Abstract

The Teachers’ Judgments about Ethical Violations Survey (TJEVS) is a psychometric instrument designed to evaluate educators’ cognitive and professional appraisals of ethical infractions within instructional, institutional, and interpersonal educational contexts. Developed by David E. Barrett and colleagues (Barrett et al., 2012) as an expanded and updated iteration of their earlier 34-item measure (Barrett et al., 2006), the 41-item TJEVS addresses traditional ethical dilemmas alongside contemporary challenges, including digital communication and classroom technology integration. The instrument employs a dual-rating assessment architecture wherein respondents evaluate each scenario along two independent five-point Likert scales: (a) the perceived frequency of the violation within schools, and (b) the perceived seriousness or severity of the behavior as a breach of professional standards.

Psychometric evaluation based on a normative sample of 593 educators (comprising 108 preservice teachers and 485 practicing inservice educators) demonstrated high internal consistency and clear structural validity. Principal components analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation revealed an interpretable four-factor structure spanning 24 core items: Personal Harm (6 items), Carelessness (6 items), Public/Private Boundary Violation (7 items), and Grade Inflation (5 items). Internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) coefficients for the seriousness dimensions ranged from .81 to .94, and for the frequency dimensions from .76 to .89. Significant discrepancies emerge between preservice and inservice educators, as well as between perceived frequency and perceived severity. The TJEVS provides educational researchers, teacher educators, and school administrators with an empirical framework to assess ethical decision-making, evaluate the efficacy of ethics curricula, and inform administrative policy and codes of conduct.

Keywords

Teachers’ Judgments about Ethical Violations Survey, TJEVS, teacher ethics, professional ethics in education, ethical decision-making, preservice teacher training, educational psychometrics, teacher misconduct, dual-axis rating, ethical judgment

Authors

The Teachers’ Judgments about Ethical Violations Survey was developed by David E. Barrett, Ph.D., in collaboration with academic colleagues including Kathy N. Headley, Ed.D., Bobbi Stovall, and Peter B. Wiles. The principal investigators were affiliated with the Eugene T. Moore School of Education and the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina, United States.

Inquiries regarding the theoretical derivation and psychometric properties of the TJEVS are traditionally addressed to the corresponding author, David E. Barrett, Department of Teacher Education, Clemson University. Their investigative program focuses on the moral reasoning of educators, codes of conduct, professional ethics education, and the measurement of professional boundary maintenance in elementary and secondary school environments.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Teachers’ Judgments about Ethical Violations Survey (TJEVS) is to systematically operationalize and assess how educators conceptualize, identify, and categorize professional misconduct. While professions such as clinical psychology, medicine, and law possess rigorously codified, legally enforced ethical codes with dedicated disciplinary infrastructure, K–12 education has historically operated under broader, aspirational moral guidelines that are frequently decentralized or vague. Consequently, teachers must regularly exercise individual moral agency in navigating complex, ambiguous ethical dilemmas involving vulnerable minors, institutional power dynamics, parental pressure, and instructional responsibilities.

The TJEVS was created to address this operational gap by achieving several critical clinical, educational, and empirical objectives:

• Dual-Perspective Cognitive Appraisal: Unlike unidimensional ethics tests that measure only moral disapproval, the TJEVS captures both the perceived severity (seriousness) of an ethical infraction and its perceived prevalence (frequency). This bifurcated structure allows researchers to uncover systemic cognitive dissonances—such as behaviors recognized as highly unethical yet perceived as pervasive (e.g., grade inflation), or infractions perceived as minor but occurring rarely.
• Evaluating Teacher Preparation and Professional Socialization: The scale serves as a standardized diagnostic tool for comparing preservice teacher candidates with seasoned, inservice classroom practitioners. Empirical data demonstrate that preservice teachers often hold idealistic or uncalibrated views regarding instructional boundaries, confidentiality, and institutional authority, whereas inservice educators calibrate their ethical judgments around pragmatic classroom management and administrative accountability.
• Curricular and Pedagogical Assessment: Teacher preparation programs utilize the TJEVS as a pre- and post-instruction measure to evaluate the efficacy of professional ethics coursework, moral dilemma discussions, and legal compliance workshops.
• Policy Development and Risk Mitigation: School district administrators and state boards of education employ the instrument to identify localized vulnerability zones (e.g., inappropriate social media boundaries, improper grade manipulation, or instructional carelessness), guiding targeted professional development and policy refinement.

Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct measured by the TJEVS is professional ethical judgment within educational settings. This construct refers to an educator’s cognitive capacity to evaluate professional actions against established normative moral principles, professional standards, duty of care, and legal boundaries. Rather than evaluating general moral orientation or abstract ethical philosophies (such as utilitarianism or deontology), the TJEVS assesses situated domain-specific ethical appraisal across four primary dimensions:

1. Personal Harm

The Personal Harm dimension captures behaviors that pose direct physical, psychological, emotional, or developmental threats to students. Grounded in the ethical imperative of non-maleficence, this factor represents the most critical domain of teacher misconduct. Violations in this domain violate the fundamental fiduciary relationship between educator and pupil, involving severe breaches of trust and abuses of authority.

Behaviors loading on this factor include engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with minors (Item 8), making sexually provocative comments (Item 22), using profanity or derogatory language in instructional spaces (Items 16 and 18), breaching student confidentiality by disseminating sensitive information to peers (Item 29), and permitting peer-to-peer romantic conduct in the classroom (Item 30). In psychometric appraisals, this subscale consistently elicits the highest severity ratings, with educators viewing harm to students as universally unacceptable.

2. Carelessness

The Carelessness dimension reflects lapses in professional competence, pedagogical diligence, and institutional stewardship. This construct is grounded in the standard of professional beneficence and procedural integrity. Rather than active malice, it reflects negligent practice, inadequate preparation, and disregard for pedagogical standards.

Manifestations of carelessness include delivering instruction without adequate lesson planning (Item 13), presenting substantive academic content without verifying accuracy (Item 5), returning evaluated assignments without actionable diagnostic feedback or error corrections (Item 11), engaging in unprofessional workplace gossip regarding students (Item 12), disparaging professional colleagues to peers (Item 21), and appropriating colleagues’ instructional materials without professional attribution (Item 26).

3. Public/Private Boundary Violation

The Public/Private Boundary Violation dimension operationalizes an educator’s failure to maintain professional demarcation between their occupational role and private life, as well as between authorized instructional practices and unauthorized personal choices. The contemporary educational landscape—characterized by ubiquitous digital communication and social networks—has significantly complicated role-boundary maintenance.

This subscale evaluates boundary blurring across physical and virtual spaces: engaging in non-academic communications with students via social media platforms (Item 33), employing unvetted classroom technology without administrative authorization (Item 17), dressing in an unprofessional manner within the school facility (Item 24), exhibiting unprofessional comportment in the private sphere outside of work (Item 25), hiring students to perform personal domestic chores (Item 34), encouraging students to address the instructor by their personal first name (Item 36), and utilizing unverified web-downloaded lesson plans in place of tailored instructional design (Item 41).

4. Grade Inflation

The Grade Inflation construct measures the compromise of academic assessment integrity, evaluation fairness, and grading equity due to external or internal pressures. Grading integrity is essential to the distributive justice of educational institutions, as academic marks serve as gatekeeping metrics for honors, scholarships, and post-secondary opportunities.

This dimension encompasses altering or elevating student marks in response to parental lobbying (Item 1), student demands (Item 10), administrative coercion (Item 27), interpersonal favoritism based on personal affinity (Item 14), and blanket administrative or philosophical refusals to assign failing grades to substandard academic performance (Item 28). The TJEVS captures the pervasive ethical conflict between pedagogical accuracy and systemic pressure to maintain high pass rates.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the TJEVS integrates several prominent paradigms within cognitive developmental psychology, professional ethics, and organizational behavior:

Rest’s Four-Component Model of Morality

The instrument draws significantly from James Rest’s (Rest, 1986) Neo-Kohlbergian Four-Component Model, which posits that moral behavior results from four interacting psychological processes: (a) Moral Sensitivity (perceiving the presence of an ethical dilemma and recognizing how actions affect others), (b) Moral Judgment (evaluating which actions are morally justifiable), (c) Moral Motivation (prioritizing moral values over competing personal, social, or institutional demands), and (d) Moral Character (possessing the persistence to execute ethical actions).

The TJEVS focuses primarily on Moral Sensitivity and Moral Judgment. By asking respondents to rate the seriousness of infractions, the survey measures moral judgment against professional norms. Simultaneously, by requiring respondents to rate perceived frequency, it assesses ecological awareness and environmental moral sensitivity to systemic ethical climates.

Social Domain Theory

The theoretical interpretation of the TJEVS also aligns with Larry Nucci and Elliot Turiel’s Social Domain Theory (Turiel, 1983). This model distinguishes between three distinct cognitive domains of social knowledge: the Moral Domain (universal concepts of justice, welfare, and rights), the Societal/Conventional Domain (arbitrary, context-dependent social norms, school rules, and institutional regulations), and the Personal Domain (matters of personal preference and private choice). In the TJEVS:

• Personal Harm represents the moral domain: harming, degrading, or exploiting students is intrinsically wrong across all contexts.
• Carelessness and Grade Inflation bridge the moral and conventional domains: they involve professional duty, fairness, and institutional regulations.
• Public/Private Boundary Violation involves tensions between the conventional domain (institutional conduct codes) and the personal domain (an educator’s off-duty personal liberty, dress, and communication preferences).

Boundary Theory and Role Theory

In addition to cognitive developmental models, the instrument incorporates structural Role Theory and organizational Boundary Theory. Teachers occupy dual social positions: private citizens endowed with personal autonomy, and state-sanctioned professionals bound by fiduciary obligations. When boundary ambiguity emerges—heightened by electronic communications, digital networking, and informal classroom dynamics—the risk of role conflict and unethical behavior increases significantly.

Validity

Psychometric validation of the 41-item TJEVS established robust evidence for construct, content, and known-groups validity (Barrett et al., 2012):

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity was established through principal components analysis (PCA) with orthogonal (varimax) rotation conducted on seriousness ratings. Initial extraction yielded five eigenvalues exceeding unity. Examination of the scree plot and factor interpretability led the investigators to retain a four-factor model accounting for substantial common variance across 24 core items:

• Personal Harm (6 items): High distinct factor loadings ranging from .65 to .84, demonstrating exceptional structural cohesion.
• Carelessness (6 items): Loadings between .51 and .76, capturing pedagogical and professional negligence.
• Public/Private Boundary Violation (7 items): Factor loadings ranging from .48 to .73, confirming empirical independence from personal harm.
• Grade Inflation (5 items): Robust loadings from .60 to .82, confirming a unified dimension of evaluative compromise.

The fifth extracted factor contained non-interpretable item clusters and was discarded, yielding a clean, parsimonious four-dimension construct.

Content and Curricular Validity

Content validity was confirmed through rigorous panel review by panels of educational psychologists, experienced school principals, district superintendents, and teacher educators. Item formulations directly operationalized the professional standards articulated by the National Education Association (NEA) Code of Ethics and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE, 2008) National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers. Six novel items specifically addressed emerging technology infractions (e.g., social media interactions, unapproved software, uncredited online material), ensuring high ecological validity.

Known-Groups and Comparative Validity

Validity was further corroborated through multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) examining systematic group differences across professional status and gender:

• Preservice vs. Inservice Educators: Significant main effects were observed (p < .001). Practicing inservice teachers judged Carelessness and Grade Inflation as significantly more serious and more frequent than preservice candidates. Preservice teachers, lacking immersive classroom experience, underestimated the prevalence and complexity of institutional pressures.
• Gender Discrepancies: Female educators consistently assigned higher seriousness ratings to ethical violations, particularly in the Personal Harm and Boundary Violation domains, mirroring findings across empirical ethics literature regarding gender differences in moral appraisal.

Reliability

The reliability of the TJEVS has been evaluated through classical test theory across its constituent subscales for both measurement dimensions: Seriousness and Frequency (Barrett et al., 2012).

Internal Consistency Reliability

Internal consistency estimates, assessed via Cronbach’s alpha (α), demonstrate high reliability across both evaluation axes:

• Personal Harm Subscale (6 items):
  • Seriousness Dimension: α = .94
  • Frequency Dimension: α = .89
• Carelessness Subscale (6 items):
  • Seriousness Dimension: α = .84
  • Frequency Dimension: α = .82
• Grade Inflation Subscale (5 items):
  • Seriousness Dimension: α = .87
  • Frequency Dimension: α = .80
• Public/Private Boundary Violation Subscale (7 items):
  • Seriousness Dimension: α = .81
  • Frequency Dimension: α = .76

All eight reliability coefficients meet or exceed standard psychometric thresholds (α > .70 for research, α > .80 for subscale diagnostics), indicating minimal measurement error and high item intercorrelation within each factor.

Factor Analysis

The exploratory psychometric evaluation of the TJEVS was conducted using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) with orthogonal Varimax rotation to establish the underlying dimensionality of teachers’ judgments of ethical violations (Barrett et al., 2012). The sample comprised 593 total respondents, comfortably satisfying the 10:1 subject-to-item ratio recommended for multivariate structural extraction.

During the analytical procedure, five components initially exceeded the Kaiser-Guttman criterion (eigenvalue > 1.0). However, the fifth component exhibited minimal unique variance, unstable cross-loadings, and lacked substantive theoretical coherence. It was therefore dropped, yielding the verified four-factor structure.

The remaining 17 items of the 41-item survey did not meet the conservative factor loading threshold (minimum loading of .45 with cross-loadings < .30) or constituted unique single-item legal violations (e.g., Item 20: failing to follow special education guidelines; Item 37: using physical force; Item 39: failing to report violent threats). Consequently, while 24 items define the four psychometric factor scores, all 41 items are retained in the full instrument to provide comprehensive descriptive profiling of classroom ethical violations.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Teachers’ Judgments about Ethical Violations Survey are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Teachers’ Judgments about Ethical Violations Survey (TJEVS)
• Original Authors: David E. Barrett, Kathy N. Headley, Bobbi Stovall, and Peter B. Wiles (2012; foundational version Barrett et al., 2006)
• Target Population: Preservice teacher candidates, practicing K–12 inservice teachers, instructional specialists, and school administrators
• Test Format: Standardized self-report inventory consisting of professional conduct vignettes presented as short behavioral statements
• Total Number of Items: 41 behavioral statements
• Dual-Rating Evaluation Framework: For each of the 41 items, respondents provide two independent evaluations:
  • Rating A (Perceived Frequency): Extent of agreement that the behavior occurs frequently in educational settings
  • Rating B (Perceived Seriousness): Extent of agreement that the behavior represents a serious violation of professional standards
• Response Scale (5-Point Likert):
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neutral
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Subscale Scoring (24 Core Items):
  • Personal Harm Score: Mean or sum of Items 7, 8, 16, 22, 29, 30 (computed separately for Seriousness and Frequency)
  • Carelessness Score: Mean or sum of Items 5, 11, 12, 13, 21, 26 (computed separately for Seriousness and Frequency)
  • Public/Private Boundary Violation Score: Mean or sum of Items 17, 24, 25, 33, 34, 36, 41 (computed separately for Seriousness and Frequency)
  • Grade Inflation Score: Mean or sum of Items 1, 10, 14, 27, 28 (computed separately for Seriousness and Frequency)
• Administration Time: Approximately 15 to 25 minutes for completion of both rating axes

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Teachers’ Judgments about Ethical Violations Survey was published in 2012 in Teaching and Teacher Education (Elsevier Ltd.). The foundational 34-item iteration was published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychology (Heldref Publications / Taylor & Francis).

The survey is widely available for non-commercial educational research, university teacher preparation assessments, and academic studies under fair-use scholarly provisions, provided appropriate bibliographic citation is accorded to Barrett et al. (2012). No commercial testing fees are mandated for non-funded academic research. Researchers seeking to implement the instrument within institutional evaluation systems, commercial professional development platforms, or digital software applications should contact the primary author (Dr. David E. Barrett) and obtain copyright clearance from the publisher (Elsevier).

References

• Barrett, D. E., Headley, K. N., Stovall, B., & Wiles, P. B. (2006). Teachers’ perceptions of the frequency and seriousness of violations of ethical standards. The Journal of Psychology, 140(5), 421–434. https://doi.org/10.3200/JRLP.140.5.421-434
• Barrett, D. E., Headley, K. N., Stovall, B., & Wiles, P. B. (2012). How do teachers make judgments about ethical and unethical behaviors? Toward the development of a code of conduct for teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 28(6), 890–898. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2012.04.003
• Boon, H. J. (2011). Raising the bar: Ethics education for quality teachers. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 36(7), 76–93. https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2011v36n7.5
• Cummings, R., Dyas, L., Maddux, C. D., & Kochman, A. (2001). Principled moral reasoning and behavior of preservice teacher education students. American Educational Research Journal, 38(1), 143–158. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312038001143
• International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). National educational technology standards for teachers (2nd ed.). International Society for Technology in Education.
• Rest, J. R. (1986). Moral development: Advances in research and theory. Praeger Publishers.
• Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge University Press.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)