On the Elusive Nature of Measuring Teacher Change: An Examination of the Stages of Concern Questionnaire

指導教授： Chen, Ming-puu報 告 者： Weng, Chung-ming報告日期： 2007/05/05

Paul G. S. & Ann R. C.(1999). On the elusive nature of measuring teacher change: An Examination of the Stages of Concern Questionnaire. Evaluation and Research in Education, 13(1),3-17.

Introduction

Investigated the quality of data gathered from the Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ)

Two hypotheses: 1. The subscales of Awareness and Refocusing lack reliability and sh

ould be removed from consideration in the SoCQ instrument; 2. Reorganising the seven-stage SoCQ into a five-stage questionnaire

can provide more representative data about levels of concern. Results of the study supported the first hypothesis but did n

ot support the second hypothesis.

Background

CBAM proposes seven stages of concern as teachers implement a new innovation: Awareness, Information, Personal, Management, Consequence, Collaboration, and Refocusing.

A Likert-scale instrument called the Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ) was developed to provide quantitative data reflective of the CBAM stages of concern (Hall & Loucks, 1978; Hall et al., 1986).

Theoretical Framework

The authors found low reliability estimates for the Awareness stage (0.42) and the Refocusing stage (0.61).

Five factors were found to provide the best model to fit the data for the 35 items.

The Bailey and Palsha factor analysis produced a five factor, 35-item model with Cronbach-alpha reliability estimates of 0.83 for Awareness, 0.81 for Personal, 0.79 for Management, 0.74 for Impact, and 0.60 for Collaboration.

Design

Two phases The first phase focused on the original SoCQ and

the revision of the SoCQ suggested by Bailey and Palsha (1992).

The second phase revised 27-item, five-stage SoCQ

Procedure

Determine whether particular items among the 35 questions might be eliminated from the instrument or whether parameters might be freed to load on additional factors

A revised 27-item, five-stage SoCQ emerged which became the primary object of study in the second phase

Squared Multiple Correlation

The SMC provides a notion of the extent of the relationship between an item and its assigned construct (the generally low SMC values may have resulted from reduced variance for the pre-test data sample).

Squared Multiple Correlation (SMC) values for items of the modified SoCQ ranged from 0.010 to 0.634.

Participants

Data for the first phase of the study were gathered from 376 algebra teachers who attended a seven day inservice programme at one of 16 sites across the state of North Carolina during summer, 1992.

Data for the second phase came from 273 algebra teachers who participated in the same seven-day inservice programme at one of 17 sites across North Carolina during summer, 1993.

Materials

Teachers completed the 35-item SoCQ form (Hall et al., 1986) on the first day of the training.

This questionnaire contained Likert items with seven response categories ranging from 0 = irrelevant to me, 1 = not true of me now, to 7 = very true of me now.

Preceding the administration of the questionnaire, teachers were given written examples demonstrating how to classify varying degrees of concern.

Results- First phase study

Results- First phase study

For the original 35-item SoCQ, reliabilities of the Awareness and Refocusing subscales were very low (0.45 and 0.52, respectively).

For the modified 35-item five-factor SoCQ, general improvement in the Cronbach-alpha values was found over those of the original instrument

This outcome agreed with the results of Bailey and Palsha. Results for the modified 27-item five-factor SoCQ are from the second phase study.

Results-Second phase study

Results-Second phase study

Summary

Provide a cautionary note for staff developers and researchers using the SoCQ concerning the elusive nature of measuring teacher change.

Recommendations of the study included omitting the two stages of Awareness and Refocusing from the original seven-stage questionnaire due to their low reliability, and attempting to validate information generated from the remaining stages using additional data sources.