Designing and validating an evaluation inventory for assessing teachers’ professional accountability

Research has already established the boundless potential of teachers in assisting effective learning processes, and there is still a need to expand research to illustrate interrelation and connection between the construct of teachers’ professional accountability which moderates and directs student learning. To this end, a comprehensive review of the literature was conducted by the researchers to explore and extract relevant theoretical constructs to teacher accountability. A literature review was followed by structured interviews with 20 administrators, teachers, students, and parents to record perceived concepts related to teacher accountability. Content analysis of recorded interviews and thematic network analysis of literature resulted in a 30-item Likert scale. The researcher-made questionnaire was subject to reliability and validity issues. Thus, in the second phase, the questionnaire was piloted with 142 male and female EFL in-service teachers selected on the basis of the convenient sampling method. Factor analysis on data collected through this reduced the items to 29 and indicated that data on teacher accountability loaded on five components including accountability towards students (N: 7 items), parents (N: 5 items), school leadership (N: 5 items), society (N: 7 items), and the profession (N: 5 items). The results also indicated that the questionnaire enjoys sound psychometric properties of reliability (α: 0.88 ˂0.5). The upshots of this study could provide a better understanding of the concept and lead teachers to be more coherent and accountable.