Psychometric properties of a Questionnaire on Teaching Difficulties among Master's Degree Students

Abstract

Detecting the difficulties that students perceive in their first contacts with the profession is essential for adapting their training. For this reason, this article aims to confirm the validity of the Teaching Problems Inventory (Jordell, 1985) for a sample of teacher training and Master's degree students. For this purpose, Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the Teaching Difficulties Scale were performed to confirm that the theoretical structure proposed by previous studies fit our data. The goodness of fit was good overall, indicating that the four factors proposed by Cañón (2012) fit the data appropriately. Additional revealed a strong relationship of the items to each factor and the lack of collinearity between factors. Reliability analysis indicated that the items produced reliable scores in each factor as well in the total score. Finally, sensitivity analysis showed that the scale was sensitive enough to capture different ratings with different groups of age.