The Scale of Teacher Agency in Professional Development: The Validity and Reliability Study

Professional development is considered a significant component of teacher agency, recognized as a fundamental competency of the profession and a component of teacher identity. Currently, there is a notable absence of measurement tools in the extant literature that assess teachers' agency levels in the context of their professional development. Addressing this lacuna, the present study aims to develop a scale to evaluate teachers' agency levels in professional development. The study group comprised 293 teachers for exploratory factor analysis and 242 teachers for confirmatory factor analysis. The scale was developed in accordance with the recommended steps for scale development. It consists of 17 items, which are distributed across three dimensions (continuous professional development, voluntary initiatives for professional development, self-evaluation). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to assess the scale's construct validity. The internal consistency of the scale was then determined using Cronbach's Alpha value. The analyses yielded the Scale of Teacher Agency in Professional Development, a scale that has been proven to be both valid and reliable in determining the level of teachers' agency in the professional development process.