Development of an instrument to measure preschool teachers´beliefs in inquiry-based activities

Gavora, Peter

Development of an instrument to measure preschool teachers´beliefs in inquiry-based activities / Peter Gavora, Adriana Wiegerová. -- This research was supported by a grant from the Development of Organisation´s Research Excellence (RVO), Tomas Bata University. - Professional beliefs is an important factor that influences activities that preschool teachers organize and manage in the classroom. In order to determine how strong these beliefs are, valid and reliable instruments must be at disposal. This research aimed to develop and validate DPBA, an instrument designed to measure teachers' beliefs toward the use of inquiry-based activities in preschool classes. A sample of 1,004 Czech preschool teachers was used to obtain the validation data. From the initial set of 40 items, a final version of DPBA with 22 items was created in a series of analyses. Principal component and maximum likelihood methods with Varimax rotation were used to extract an appropriate scale structure. DPBA is composed of three subscales, Benefits (12 items), Teacher competence (6 items) and Concerns (4 items), which have reliabilities of .906;.847 and .729, respectively. The overall reliability of the instrument is .883. Consistently high reliability coefficients were obtain

In Journal of Baltic Science Education. -- Šiauliai : Scientia Socialis, 2019. -- ISSN 1648-3898. -- ISSN 2538-7138. -- Vol. 18, no. 4 (2019), pp. 558-568