Validating the Chinese Version of the Personal Accountability Measure for Assessing Teachers’ Perceptions and Experiences of Teacher Accountability in China

Abstract

The study aims to validate the Chinese version of Personal Accountability Measure (PAM-Ch), which is used to assess the subjective aspect of teacher accountability, by surveying 1146 teachers enrolled in professional development courses offered by a public university in Beijing. The validation process involved two phases. First, the samples were randomly divided into three subgroups—for subgroup 1 (n = 390), exploratory factor analysis was computed; for subgroup 2 (n = 359), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was computed; and, for subgroup 3 (n = 381), a new CFA was performed for cross-validation. Second, Cronbach’s α, composite reliability (CR), average variance extracted (AVE), maximum shared variance (MSV), and average shared variance (ASV) were calculated for testing the reliability and validity. Throughout the process, three measurement models were tested for the adaptation of the PAM-Ch in this study. The results found that Model 2 was the best fit for the data, whose factor loadings ranged from 0.72–0.95 for internal accountability (factor 1) and 0.75–0.89 for external accountability (factor 2). The CRs of these two factors were 0.963 and 0.916, respectively, and the AVE values were 0.790 and 0.645, respectively, indicating that the PAM-Ch is a reliable and valid measure.