Development and Validation of Teaching Practice Evaluation Instrument for Assessing Chemistry Students’ Teaching Skills

Abstract

The study was designed to develop and factorially validate an instrument for measuring teaching practice skills of chemistry student-teachers in University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Two research questions guided the study. The design of the study was instrumentation. All the chemistry student-teachers in the Department of Science Education, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, involved in teaching practice in November 2011 formed the population for the study. No sampling technique was used as all the population formed the sample for the study. The instrument known as TPEF (teaching practice evaluation form) was developed. It was used to collect data for answering the research questions. The instrument was face validated and subjected to factor analysis using rotated component matrix to establish the construct validity. FL (factor loading) range of 0.35 and above (Meredith, 1969) was used for the extraction of the valid items. Internal consistency reliability coefficient of the instrument was established using Kendall’s coefficient of concordance. The result of the analysis shows that TPEF was valid and reliable. It also shows that there was agreement among the raters. Based on these findings, the educational implications were discussed and recommendations made including that teachers in tertiary institutions should use this instrument in assessing chemistry student-teachers during their teaching practice due to its validity and reliability in assessing teaching practice skills in chemistry.