Session Information
WERA SES 01 B, Feedback and Coaching to Promote the Professional Reflection and Learning of School Leaders
Symposium
Contribution
This paper reports on results from the piloting of the ICT-based inventory in nine countries (Australia, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, England, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland), with a particular focus on the statistical as well as the social validation of the 29 leadership scales used in the inventory. Besides testing psychometric measures, it is argued that social validation - in terms of meeting participants’ expectations and the perceived usefulness related to using the feedback for reflection on strengths and weaknesses - is also crucial in order to improve the inventory. The scales developed and used as part of the inventory draw on school leadership research conducted over the last decades and aim to measure constructs related to key competencies required of school leaders. The inventory formats include questionnaire scales, cognitive tests, and implicit test formats. The scales comprise of 18 general school leadership competencies and nine tasks specific to school leadership competencies. First, the classical test theory was used to test for homogeneity, item difficulty, etc. Second, further analytic techniques to assess the quality of the scales included the Rasch analysis, which makes it possible to investigate unidimensionality, irrelevant variances (misfits), the representation of scales for the whole dataset, and how the scales work within each country context (DIF-analysis). Third, to investigate social validation, a quantitative survey was sent to participants in their own language towards the end of the project. The survey aimed to map and compare key features of their learning experience across countries, including their perceptions of the inventory and the feedback provided, and the impact of these activities on their reflection, leadership behavior, or career planning. Altogether, the datasets include responses from 965 school leaders, who all took part in the international piloting of the inventory. Using the Rasch analysis provides a stricter way of testing the scales than is normally applied for such inventories. However, the results show improvement areas that would not have been easily discovered without this model. Especially, the validation of the scales in a couple of countries indicates some challenges related to item formulations and culture contexts. The paper provides examples of more precise actions to be taken as a result of this type of analysis.
References
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