Validating a Continuing Professional Development Scale among Iranian EFL Teachers

Abstract

Some EFL teachers have tragically fossilized in their career and have reluctantly participated in teachers' in-service classes. Teachers Continuous Professional Development (CPD) is an indispensable part of teaching career. Accordingly, the current study was to design, develop, and validate items for an effective scale for CPD programs in Iranian English foreign language context. In fact, factor analysis was the main concern in this study. Initially, the tentative model with 55 items was piloted and tested through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of 400 English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers. This level resulted in the removal of 8 items in the sample loaded and led to the final CPD inventory with 47 items. Convergent validity of the CPD variable was derived from the output of confirmatory factor analysis in the Lisrel Software. The significant score of all model parameters was larger than 1.96. Therefore, the validity of the construct of measuring the relevant variables was substantiated and confirmed at a significant level of 0.05. Furthermore, the result indicated that the research model was in the domain of acceptance. Also, convergent validity was confirmed and validated. The fitting indexes of the model also revealed that the measurement models were substantiated in terms of external validity. The findings of this study can offer pedagogical implications to English teaching and learning stakeholders, educational policy makers, officials, and those involved in second language teacher education as well as English language teachers in EFL contexts.