A limited body of research on stress related to teacher students field practice placements in the Danish teacher education context. Internationally, a Greek study conducted immediately after field practice found that emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment were predicted by field practice workload, while depersonalisation was predicted by epistemological beliefs and field practice-related stressors such as meeting pupils’ needs (Kokkinos & Stavropoulos, 2016). In addition, a Canadian study among teacher students in their last field practice found significantly increasing self-efficacy and significantly decreasing stress during field placement (Klassen & Durksen, 2014). No Danish instruments for measurement of field practice related stress could be identified. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Danish consensus translation of Cohen’s 10-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) adapted to teaching field practice using Rasch models with a sample of 247 teacher students immediately after they had finished a field practice placement in the fall of 2020. The adapted instrument (named PSPS for Perceived Stress in Practice Scale) consists, as has been shown in more than forty studies for the PSS-10, of two subscales; Perceived Stress in Practice (PSP) and Perceived Lack of Control in Practice (PLCP). For each of the two subscales one item was eliminated before fit to a graphical loglinear Rasch model was possible. In both subscales displayed substantial local dependence between items, but no differential item functioning relative to level of field practice, campus, teacher degree program, gender or age. Reliability of each subscale was sufficient for statistical research purposes, but not identification of students in need of support. Targeting of the PSP subscale was good, targeting of the PLCP subscale somewhat poorer. Results do not differ substantially from previous research with the PSS-10. While the results are promising, further studies with larger samples should be done.

PARTICIPANTS: The target population was Danish teacher students, who had just completed a field practice placement as part of their four-year long teacher education program at one Danish University College. The Danish teacher education program includes three field practice placements with common learning objectives across university colleges. Data were collected using an online survey during the month of December 2020, starting immediately after the end of a field practice placement. During the data collection 3 students dropped out of the teacher education program. Of the 247 students with complete data on exogenous variables for the purpose of DIF-analyses, 127 just completed their level III, 104 their level II, and 16 their level I field practice, respectively. INSTRUMENT: The Danish consensus translation (Eskildsen et al., 2015) of the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS10; Cohen & Williamson, 1988) was adapted to form the PSPS (Perceived Stress in Practice Scale) for the present study. Each of the original PSS-10 items start with “In the last month, how often …”, for the PSPS this was changed to “How often in your latest field practice placement …”; subscales denoted PSP (Perceived Stress in Practice) and PLCP (Perceived Lack of Control in Practice) The original five response categories from the PSS-10 were used; 0 = Never, 1 = Almost Never, 2 = Sometimes, 3 = Fairly Often, 4 = Very Often. ANALYSES: Item analyses to uncover in detail the psychometric properties and validity of the PSPS-10 were conducted within the IRT framework using the family of Rasch models. Given the known impact of both local response dependence and DIF on the psychometric properties of a scale (e.g. inflated alpha estimates and biased estimates of the person parameters; Holland & Wainer, 1993; Marais, 2013), emphasis was put on the issues of local response dependence (LRD) between items and differential item functioning (DIF) with regard to level of field practice (III, II, I), campus (1, 2), teacher degree program (ordinary, other), gender (female, male), and age (24 and younger, 25 and older) within the two subscales of the PSS-10. Due to this emphasis, we used the Rasch model (Rasch, 1960) generalised for ordinal data, and graphical loglinear Rasch models, which can effectively test models with DIF and LRD terms included in the same manner as with the Rasch model (Kreiner & Christensen, 2007). The DIGRAM software package (Kreiner & Nielsen, 2013; Kreiner, 2003) was used for all analyses.

Neither the PSP nor the PLCP fitted the Rasch model. In the PSP subscale, item 10 was eliminated due to item misfit. The resulting five-item PSP subscale fitted a graphical loglinear Rasch model without evidence of DIF, but with all items involved in local dependence. In the PLCP subscale, it was not possible to fulfil all requirements of the Rasch model with the full subscale. Taking inspiration from an ongoing Spanish study of the psychometric properties of the PSS-10 using comparable methods, item 4 was eliminated from the PLCP subscale. The resulting three-item PLCP subscale fitted a graphical loglinear Rasch model without evidence of DIF, but items 5 and 8 being locally dependent. Previous research with the Danish PSS-10 for university students and an Australia population sample study of the PSS-14 using comparable methods have likewise shown a lack of locally independent items in each subscale, but also substantial DIF (Nielsen & Dammeyer, 2019; Ribeiro et al., 2020). The lack of evidence of DIF in the present study should be investigated further with a larger sample. The reliability, while taking into account the effect of local dependence between items, of both the PSP and the PLC subscales were less than satisfactory (0.67 in both cases). This does not reflect measures reflect measures that can correctly identify whom of two randomly drawn persons is the high and low scoring one, and thus identify students in need of support. Thus, the subscales are for now only recommended for research purposes and with larger samples. Targeting (of the subscales to the study population) was good for the PSP, less so for the PLCP. The PSP and PLCP scores of the teacher student is furthermore expected to be negatively correlated to their field practice grades – to be included, as grades become available.

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