A finer grain understanding of teachers’ adoption of reforms?: Development of an instrument to assess science teachers’ pedagogical discontentment (STPD)

This research focuses on science teachers’ pedagogical discontentment, a construct that describes teachers’ lack of satisfaction or contentment that occurs when teachers recognize a mismatch between their own pedagogical beliefs and their actual classroom practices. We present an instrument to be used to measure teachers’ pedagogical discontentment, an instrument that eventually will allow science educators to better describe the affective states of teachers entering professional development experiences. To inform this instrument, we conducted interviews with practicing elementary and secondary science teachers to provide us with first-hand accounts of how teachers discuss aspects of their current science teaching practices that they perceived as being less effective than desired. From these interviews 45 items were designed around a group of 5 subscales, and this instrument was administered to a group of 171 science teachers. Factor analysis identified that 30 of these items fell out along 5 subscales, each with a high internal consistency, confirming the theoretical categories identified in the interviews. The revised 30-item measure was administered to a sample of 200 elementary, middle and secondary teachers. The revised scale is described along with the psychometrics of this instrument.