Field Test of an Instrument Measuring the Concept of Professional Learning Communities in Schools

A new instrument was designed by S. Hord (1996) to assess globally the maturity of a school's professional staff as a learning community. The Appalachia Educational Laboratory agreed to field test this instrument to determine its reliability and validity and to draw conclusions about its use in educational improvement. The instrument consisted of 17 descriptors of a professional learning community grouped into 5 major dimensions or areas. Faculties of 21 schools (6 elementary, 6 middle and junior high schools, and 9 high schools) participated, for a total of 690 teachers. Some analyses used smaller samples. All five internal consistency reliabilities for the dimension items were in the mid 0.80s, and concurrent validities for the 114 high school teachers scores was 0.75. Factor analysis revealed that a unitary factor of all 17 items accounted for 54 percent of the variance. Results show that the instrument did differentiate the faculties in terms of their maturity as learning communities, and that these differences were evident across elementary, middle/junior high, and high school levels. The instrument appears useful as a screening, filtering, or measuring device to assess the maturity of a school's professional staff. (Contains 16 tables and 22 references.) (SLD)