Development and Validation of Assessment Practice Inventory for Teacher Educators

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to develop and validate an assessment practice inventory for teacher educators adapted from Zhang and Burry-Stock (1994, copyright 2003) to be used to evaluate assessment practice among teacher educators. The initial instrument contained 70 items (excluding background information) that were divided into three important sections – practice related to assessment literacy standards (Section B); belief about assessment principles (Section C); and frequency of carrying out described items (Section D). The instrument was administered to 254 teacher educators from a teacher education university and a teacher training institute. Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and reliability tests were performed on the data. Results showed that the instrument developed yielded high values of internal consistency as reflected by the Cronbach alpha values. Results of EFA suggest that 21 items need to be removed due to their non-dimensionality as they have more or less equal loadings on several factors. Thus, the final draft of the instrument contained 49 items. Even though the reliability and validity of the instrument are within the acceptable range, more data need to be gathered using bigger sample size so that further analysis using Item Response Theory can be used to explore deeper into the psychometric characteristics of the items before the instrument can be finalized.