Design and validation of a teacher vocation scale for teachers

Abstract

The teaching vocation is considered an essential factor in the performance of teachers, being considered as a relevant factor in the academic achievement of students and, at the same time, an indicator of the educational quality of a country. However, there are no valid and reliable instruments that address the new challenges of the vocation. That is why we proceeded to design and validate an instrument to evaluate the teaching vocation in accordance with the new educational challenges in Mexico. By virtue of the foregoing, a Likert-type scale was designed with 23 questions and it was applied to 346 (plus 50 teachers as a pilot group) teachers of different educational levels. From the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, three factors were found: a) satisfaction with teaching; b) vocation awareness and c) educational commitment; the content and construct validity processes were carried out. The global reliability of the test was 0.96 in 21 final items; another important finding is that there are significant differences in the level of satisfaction with the teaching task according to gender. Was concluded that the instrument has sufficient validity and reliability to carry out the analysis of the vocation in teachers.