The Development and Validation of an Inventory of Effective School Function

Abstract

For a sample of 124 teachers from 18 schools of the Distinguished Schools Group of the State of California, the major purpose of this investigation was to construct and to validate a self-report instrument or measure titled the Effective School Function Inventory that serves to operationalize the major constructs and subconstructs of a conceptual model representing those activities hypothesized to be central to the efficient operation of a school. An exploratory orthogonal factor analysis of the intercorrelations of responses to the 39 Likert-type items of the inventory revealed four psychologically meaningful factors that exhibited only modest correspondence to the higher and lower order constructs underlying the conceptual model. These four factors were tentatively identified as revealing (a) Supportive Collegial Interaction, (b) Cooperative Facilitation of Goal Attainment in the Teaching-Learning Process, (c) Morally Oriented Leadership, and (d) Instructional Strategy Sharing by Teachers.