Development and Validation of a Novice Teacher and Supervisor Survey

This brief presents initial evidence about the reliability and validity of a novice teacher survey and a novice teacher supervisor survey. The novice teacher and novice teacher supervisor surveys assess how well prepared novice teachers are to meet the job requirements of teaching. The surveys are designed to provide educator preparation programs (EPPs) with information that can be used to enable program improvement, provide information for consumers, and/or ensure program accountability. The survey items are adapted from InTASC's Model Core Teaching Standards and are grouped into four domain areas: the Learner and Learning, Content, Instructional Practice, and Professional Responsibility. Online surveys were administered to novice teachers (recent graduates) statewide in Iowa and from multiple EPPs across several states in the spring of 2017. The response rate for the novice teacher survey was 19.7 percent (440 of 2,226), and for the novice teacher supervisor/principal survey the response rate was 22.4 percent (499 of 2,226). The analytic sample for the novice teacher survey is n = 433 and for the novice teacher supervisor survey n = 480. To assess the structural (or factorial) validity of the survey, confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were conducted. The results of the CFAs provide evidence that the 17 survey items cover the four intended domains and that each item is strongly related to the underlying domain. The results indicate that the hypothesized structure of model fits well with the data and that factor loadings for the subscales load significantly and moderately to strongly on each of their respective domains. Furthermore, the four factors, namely, The Learner and Learning, Content, Instructional Practice and Professional Responsibility, load significantly onto one second-order factor, referred to as Teacher Practice. Moreover, a multigroup analysis demonstrates that the instrument operates equivalently across the two groups. This brief presents initial evidence of the construct validity of the survey instruments. The following are appended: (1) Results of the novice teacher supervisor survey CFA (2) Results of a multigroup analysis that tests the factorial equivalence of the survey instruments across teachers and supervisors.