Adaptation of Teachers' Perceptions of Grading Practices Scale to Turkish and Examination of Measurement Invariance

Abstract

Grading is a complicated decision-making process that needs teachers to make value judgements on the learning, accomplishment, and development of their students. When assigning grades, teachers tend to examine a variety of criteria, including students' efforts, work habits, and accomplishments. Grades are a reflection of the value judgements made about students based on the evaluation of their academic performance. Consequently, describing how to reach a value judgment utilizing general measures will contribute to a better understanding of the difficulties encountered throughout the grading process. The purpose of this research is to adapt the Teacher Perceptions of Grading Practices Scale into Turkish and to examine the measurement invariance. This scale, which examines teachers' perceptions of grading methods, has six components: importance, usefulness, student effort, student ability, teacher's grading patterns, and perceived self-efficacy of the grading process. Before adapting the scale, permission was first acquired from the researcher who developed it. To ensure linguistic comparability, bilingual translators were recruited in the second phase. The semantic, experiential, conceptual, and idiomatic equivalence between the two variants of the scale were evaluated. The original and adapted scales were administered to a group of English teachers twice at a predetermined interval, and the consistency between the two applications was analyzed due to the fact that the language employed in the original test was a widely spoken group. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to examine the factor structure of the original scale. Cronbach's alpha and Omega coefficients were calculated for the reliability of the data obtained from the scale. Finally, the measurement invariance of the scale according to gender was examined by using Multiple Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA), and it was determined that the measurement model fulfilled the criteria of complete gender-group invariance.