Development and Validation of the Inviting Teaching Effectiveness Scale based on the Invitational Theory

This study reports on a new instrument, the Inviting Teaching Effectiveness Scale (ITES), which is a 20-item measure based on the fundamental teaching competencies derived from the principles of Invitational Education (Purkey & Novak, 1984). The initial instrument had included 30 items and was then validated on a random sample of 640 students enrolled at the University of Bahrain. The final version of the developed Scale contains 20 items and measures four aspects of inviting teaching effectiveness: Invitational instruction, inviting relationships, invitational assessment and inviting classroom environment. As the new Scale displayed sound psychometric properties, it can be considered as a potentially useful tool to assess teacher performance and improve teaching practices at tertiary level of education. Information about test construction, reliability, validity, and generalizability are presented and implications and benefits associated with use of the instrument as a tool for measuring teaching effectiveness are discussed.