Psychometric properties of a Questionnaire on Teaching Difficulties in Undergraduate and Master Teacher Degree Students

Abstract

Detecting the difficulties that students perceive in their first contacts with the profession is essential in order to adapt their training. For this reason, this article aims to confirm the validity of the Teaching Problems Inventory (Jordell, 1985) for a sample of undergraduate and master degree education students. The sample is made up of 352 students, divided into 130 undergraduate students in Early Childhood Education, 89 undergraduate students in Primary Education, and 89 students in Master’s Degree Education. For this purpose, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the Teaching Difficulties Scale were performed to confirm that the theoretical structure proposed by previous studies fit our data. The goodness of fit was good overall, indicating that the four factors proposed by Cañón (2012) fit the data appropriately. Additional factors revealed a strong relationship of the items to each factor, as well as the lack of collinearity between these. Reliability analysis indicated that the items produced reliable scores in each factor as well as in the total score. Finally, sensitivity analysis showed that the scale was sensitive enough to capture different ratings with different age groups.