The Construction and Evaluation of the Perceptions of Success Inventory for Beginning Teachers

Abstract

There were many factors that led to beginning teachers' perceptions of success. These factors included administrative support, mentor support, colleague support, resource support, teaching assignment and workload, student outcomes, commitment to teaching, continuing education and pedagogy, and professionalism and efficacy. This study investigated an instrument called the Perceptions of Success Inventory for Beginning Teachers (PSI-BT) to measure the preceding factors. Included in this study was a review of literature about beginning teachers' perceptions of success. An analysis of the psychometric properties that the PSI-BT possessed was investigated including internal reliability, content validity, and concurrent validity. A factor analysis of the PSI-BT was used to help determine content validity. Paired Sample t-tests assessed the differences between 'what is' occurring for beginning teachers and 'what should be' occurring.

The PSI-BT was found to assess the following factors through a factor analysis: 1) Administrative Support, 2) Classroom Climate, 3) Mentor Support, 4) Colleague and Instructional Resource Support, 5) Commitment, and 6) Assignment and Workload. The factors had moderate to strong internal reliability. There were nine statistically significant correlations between factors of the Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001) and PSI-BT to establish concurrent validity. The differences between 'what is' and 'what should be' were found to be significant at a p-value less than .000001 for all six factors.