Measuring emotion regulation for preservice teacher selection: A theory-driven development of a situational judgment test

Abstract

Competencies to manage one's own and others' emotions are highly relevant in teacher education but to assess them in the context of a selection personality questionnaires are subject to faking. Situational judgment tests (SJTs) are considered to be less biased by faking, therefore we developed a novel SJT for emotion regulation that is implemented in the admission exam for teacher education. Often SJT development is criticized to be too a theoretical; therefore, we aimed at a theory-driven SJT of interpersonal vs. intrapersonal emotion regulation in pedagogical situations. We used a mixed approach of inductive and deductive item construction to improve test quality (item homogeneity and measurement fairness). The final test comprises 22 items with four response alternatives, each expressing one of four emotion regulation strategies. In two studies, we examined psychometric quality, fairness and validity of the test and relations with cognitive ability and personality. Results support a psychometrically sound and gender-fair measurement according to the 1PL Rasch model. Correlations with tests for emotion regulation, openness, agreeableness and the dark triad were observed. Interpersonal emotion regulation predicted higher altruistic professional motives, whereas intrapersonal emotion regulation predicted higher teacher self-efficacy. Both are (negative) predictors of the intention to quit teacher education.