LEADING CHANGE: VALIDATING AN INSTRUMENT TO MEASURE ACTION RESEARCH CULTURE AND TEACHER QUALITY IN MALAYSIAN SCHOOLS
Keywords:
action research, leadership, teacher professional development, psychometric validation, Malaysia primary educationAbstract
This study report the development and validation of an instrument designed to evaluate action research leadership culture, teacher commitment, and teacher quality in Malaysian primary schools. Recognizing the need for reliable tools to assess these interrelated constructs, the instrument was grounded in Kotter’s Change Model, the Standard Kualiti Pendidikan Malaysia Gelombang 2 (SKPMg2), and Herscovitch and Meyer’s commitment framework. The development process involved generating items that reflected theoretical dimensions of instructional leadership and professional engagement. Content validity was established through expert review by five specialists, who assessed the relevance and representativeness of each item. The resulting high content validity indices confirmed strong agreement among experts regarding the instrument’s coverage. Face validity was examined by language experts and a sample of 30 teachers to ensure clarity and cultural appropriateness. While most items were rated highly for comprehensibility, some terms required simplification to improve accessibility. Reliability analysis was conducted with 107 teachers using Cronbach’s Alpha and Corrected Item-Total Correlation statistics. The instrument demonstrated excellent internal consistency, with an overall Cronbach’s Alpha 0f 0.968, indicating strong reliability across all domains. These findings suggest that the instrument is psychometrically robust and suitable for assessing action research practices and their relationship to teacher quality. The study highlights the importance of combining established theoretical models with systematic validation procedures to develop accurate measurement tools. Future research should explore confirmatory factor analysis and broader application across diverse educational contexts to enhance generalizability and further strengthen the instrument’s utility.
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