Examining the psychometric features of the Teacher’s Sense of Efficacy Scale in the English-as-a-foreign-language teaching context

Abstract

Though the Teacher’s Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) is widely used with English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers, these teachers constitute a cohort left out from the widespread project to validate the scale in different fields of education. In addition, the previous validation studies have mostly applied factor analysis for this purpose, which leaves some aspects of validity untouched. Thus, through factor and Rasch analysis of the data from 435 Iranian EFL teachers, the present study was undertaken to provide evidence on the validity of using the TSES with EFL teachers. Both confirmatory factor analysis and Rasch modeling confirmed the claimed three-factor structure of the TSES; however, Rasch analysis identified a misfitting item and frequent problems with the functioning of the response categories. In search of an alternative rating scale for the TSES, Rasch analysis supported the validity of a revised rating scale with five categories. Both traditional reliability and Rasch-specific indices showed that the revised rating scale was very similar to the original rating scale of the TSES in terms of measurement precision.