Development and Initial Validation of Cultural Competence Inventory–Preservice Teachers

Abstract

Despite the critical role of emotions in multicultural teacher education, no attempt has been made to develop an instrument including affect as a dimension in measuring cultural competence for preservice teachers. To bridge this gap, the present three-study research used three distinct samples of 456 preservice teachers to develop and estimate the reliability of scores and validity of inferences for Cultural Competence Inventory–Preservice Teachers (CCI-PT), an 18-item instrument including three subscales: emotional cultural competence (ECC), behavioral cultural competence (BCC), and cognitive cultural competence (CCC). The three-factor model was supported using exploratory factor analysis ( N = 203) in Study 1 and confirmatory factor analyses ( N = 199) in Study 2. Correlation results provided preliminary evidence for the convergent and discriminant validity of CCI-PT in Study 1, and regression results in Study 3 ( N = 113) provided initial evidence of predictive validity of inference for the instrument. Further, the scores of cultural competence assessed through three independent studies also provided initial evidence of the reliability of CCI-PT.