Background:

In an era of more responsibility and accountability of principals (OECD, 2013) and a culture of quality management enhancement in school (European Commission, 2019), there are higher expectations and standards of the leadership roles of principals in improving the sustaining school atmosphere, teaching, and student outcomes (Day, Gu, & Sammons, 2016). The principal must demonstrate their abilities to encourage staff to produce desired outcomes (Bandura, 1977) and be able to utilize the staff's capabilities, increase the enthusiasm and the optimism of the staffs, facilities work, transmits of mission and values to increase efficiency and school improvement both directly and indirectly (McColl-Kennedy & Anderson, 2002).

Existing empirical research has paid much attention to assessing the principal's leadership by self-and peer assessments and its influence on student outcomes (e.g. Bowers and White (2014); Day et al. (2016)). In which these studies have lacked important assessment processes, which are the assessment of the principal's leadership from the perspective of multiple stakeholders who is crucial participation and associated with the success of schools, such as students, teachers, staff members, and parents (Odhiambo & Hii, 2012; Tran & Bon, 2015).

In Spain, there is a debate about the pedagogical leadership, effective management, and democratic decision-making of the principal because the role of the school principal is a temporary assignment of supervision to teachers (The Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, 2007). The important thing in improving the efficiency of the principal is to know the strengths and weaknesses of pedagogical leadership from self- and key stakeholder assessment. Since effective principal leadership makes a difference in improving learning outcomes (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004). This study, therefore, assessed the principal's leadership using a 360-degree assessment approach. The 360-degree assessment is where individual leader’s staff, leaders themselves (self-assessment), peers and supervisors or stakeholders are asked to provide scores or comments on questions related to their leadership role (Drew, 2009). In this study, key stakeholders were identified as teachers, students, and parents of the students.

Research questions:

The research questions that arise in this research were the following:

(1) How was the reliability and validity of the scale?;

(2) What was the degree of leadership effectiveness of principals as perceived by themselves and their stakeholders?

Objectives:

The objectives to which answer the presented information at this conference were:

(1) to examine the reliability and validity of the principals' instructional leadership scale (PILS);

(2) to compare the assessment of self and key stakeholders on principals' leadership effectiveness.

Theoretical Framework:

The theoretical framework of this research was related to the quality of the school by performing the leadership roles in such institutions, which consists of:
- The contributions of effective schools and school improvement (Scheerens, 1992, Hallinger & Heck, 1998);
- The improvement of educational institutions (Hopkins & Lagerweig, 1997);
- The concern about school restructuring, school effectiveness, and school improvement. (Stoll and Fink, 1996).
- The 360-degree assessments or multi-stakeholder perceptions (El Haddad, Karkoulian, & Nehme, 2019; Tyson & Ward, 2004).

Participants: A total of 718 participants of four groups of raters, namely student's parents, teachers, students, and principals from a different school located across 17 regions in Spain completed the questionnaire to assess principals' instructional leadership effectiveness throughout each case. 60.31% were females, and 39.69% were males. The majority of the assessor consisted of teachers (366, 50.97%), principals (140, 19.50%), student´s parents (113, 15.74%), and students (99, 13.79%). The majority of participants worked at public school (594, 82.73%), 17.27% (n = 124) worked at private school. Instrument: In order to assess the quality of principals' instructional leadership, the principals' instructional leadership scale (PILS) was developed by Gento Palacios et al. (2015) was used. It consists of 80 items capturing the eight dimensions of the instructional leadership framework. All items were scored on a 9-point scale, ranging from 1 (definitely false) to 9 (definitely very true). Higher scores reflect higher trait leadership. The eight domains of PILS has demonstrated good psychometric properties including internal consistency reliability and concurrent and predictive validity: charismatic dimension (α = 0.90, 10 items), emotional dimension (α = 0.94, 10 items), anticipatory dimension (α = 0.94, 10 items), professional dimension (α = 0.92, 10 items), participative dimension (α = 0.95, 10 items), cultural dimension (α = 0.94, 10 items), formative dimension (α = 0.94, 10 items), administrative dimension (α = 0.92, 10 items). Data collection: The data collection period was from June 2015 to October 2018 by using stratified random sampling to select the schools by taking the geographic regions and the educational network (i.e., community, subsidized private, subsidized public) into account. Statistical analyses: The statistical analyses were conducted in SPSS and Mplus version 8.3. Preliminary analyses were performed to check for univariate and multivariate normality. Descriptive analyses including means (M), standard deviations (SD), minimum (min.), maximum (max.), skewness(SK) and kurtosis (KU), and corrected item-total correlations (CITC) were calculated to evaluate the performance of the PILS. Cronbach's alpha (α) reliability coefficients were computed to assess the internal consistency for each of the dimensions. To verify the relationship between dimension, Pearson’s correlation coefficient was calculated. Construct validity was tested through a process of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). To examine the assessor group differences regarding leadership assessment rating, an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted. The Partial eta squared (η2) was calculated for providing an index of effect size to determine the meaningfulness of the differences.

Findings: For a deeper understanding and detailed practices of key stakeholders’ perceptions and to be a guide to the principals' leadership development, these principals received 360-degree feedback. Principals provided self-rating. At the same time, student's parents, teachers, and their students were asked to assess the effectiveness of principals' leadership from the observers' perspectives. Based on the observation demonstrated principals tended to rate themselves in leadership level higher than they were rated by their stakeholders. The principal showed that they themselves have the highest ratings in “Administrative” (M = 7.71, SD = 0.94) and “Charismatic” (M = 7.68, SD = 0.90), whereas “Formative” was reported by themselves as the lowest rating (M = 6.95, SD = 1.26). Parents and teachers agreed that the principals had the best practices in the "Charismatic." Principal’s strengths were described by their students in terms of "Administrative." All three groups of assessors perceived that the principals' leadership had the lowest scores on the same dimension: Formative, which is in the same way as the principal's self-assessment. To determine the structure of the scale and test the construct validity of the scale, both EFA and CFA were performed. In EFA, PILS showed the eight dimensions could be categorized into a single factor structure. According to the results of the CFA, model fit indices indicated that PILS provided an adequate fit (chi-square per degree of freedom = 17.743/10, p = 0.060, CFI = 0.999, TLI = 0.996, RMSEA = 0.033, SRMR = 0.008), suggested that the proposed model fits the data well. Standardized factor loadings ranged from 0.371 to 0.956. The F-test scores obtained from one-way ANOVA revealed there was at least one pair of statistically significantly different mean scores among the group of raters in all of the eight dimensions (p < 0.00).

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