Designing and validating a potential formative evaluation inventory for teacher competences

Abstract

Background: Inadequacy of authority-based defensive teaching and summative and product-based evaluation such as certification and observation measures in providing information about the actual teaching teachers do was an inspiration in this study to design an inventory for formative and process-based evaluation of teacher competences. This study aimed at designing an inventory for formative and process-based evaluation of teacher competences. Methods: To this end, teacher competences were theoretically defined and the indicators of competence in practice were derived and operationalized through Competency Framework for Teachers proposed by department of education and training in Australia (2004) by a panel of five EFL (English as a foreign language) teaching experts through focused group discussion. The resulting inventory was 65 items on four teacher competences including critical, clinical, personal and technical competences from three perspectives of student, departmental, learning and growth measured on 5 point likert scale. Results: Testing the inventory with 216 Iranian EFL teachers indicated that there were high Cronbach’s alpha reliability indices for the three main perspectives and their dimensions. This implies that the inventory enjoyed appropriate internal consistency. The results of exploratory factors analysis indicated that there was no construct irrelevant factor and all the indicators were loaded in the related teacher competence and perspective dimension. Four separate structural equation models (SEM) were tested in order to probe the trait structure of the inventory. The first three SEM models targeted the three perspectives individually, while the last model explored the structure of the total data. The results indicated that all items had significant contributions to their respective dimensions. Conclusions: The potential application of this inventory in teacher education programs and the factors that limit its applicability were discussed.