New Scale Measures How Ready Future Teachers Are to Embrace Group Dynamics

Every year, thousands of graduates across Spain enrol on a one-year master’s programme that will decide whether they stand in front of a secondary school classroom. The Master’s Degree in Secondary School Teaching, launched in the 2009/2010 academic year, is the compulsory gateway into the teaching profession for subject specialists in fields ranging from history to engineering. Yet a persistent question has haunted teacher educators: how can we measure whether these trainees are actually willing to use the group-based, interactive methods that modern classrooms demand? A new study from the University of Zaragoza offers an answer in the form of a rigorously validated questionnaire, and its findings could reshape how teacher training programmes are designed and evaluated.

The research, published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, was conducted by Pablo Palomero-Fernández and Eva Vicente-Sánchez, who set out to build and validate an instrument measuring the willingness of pre-service secondary teachers to use group dynamics techniques. These techniques, rooted in the classic work of Kurt Lewin and later codified by Cartwright and Zander, encompass methods such as cooperative learning, role-playing, case studies and teamwork, all of which harness group interaction to improve both learning and interpersonal relationships. Although such methods are widely promoted across European higher education, no standardised tool existed to assess whether trainee teachers genuinely intend to apply them once they enter the profession.

The theoretical foundation of the new instrument is the tripartite model of attitudes proposed by Rosenberg and Hovland in 1960, a framework that remains one of the most influential structures in social psychology. According to this model, any attitude can be decomposed into three components: cognitive beliefs, emotional responses and behavioural tendencies. The researchers translated this structure into three subscales. The first, Perceived Usefulness, captures what trainees believe about the value of group techniques for their students. The second, Emotional Experience, probes the feelings these techniques arouse during initial training. The third, Behavioural Engagement, measures the interest and intention to actually programme and deploy group methods in future professional practice.

Building a psychometrically sound instrument is a painstaking process, and the researchers followed the standardised ten-step procedure for test construction recommended by Muñiz and Fonseca. The first version of the questionnaire contained twelve items, four for each subscale, each rated on a five-point Likert scale from complete disagreement to complete agreement. To establish content validity, the draft was scrutinised by a panel of three expert judges from a Spanish university, selected against demanding criteria including at least ten years of experience in educational psychology or pedagogy, a decade of team leadership, and substantial experience teaching the master’s programme itself.

The expert judgement phase proved decisive. While the experts rated most items highly for clarity, coherence and relevance, statistical analysis using Aiken’s V content validity coefficient revealed unsatisfactory agreement regarding the adequacy of the three subscales as a whole. The qualitative feedback was rich and specific. One expert noted that the usefulness subscale focused too heavily on content and recommended adding items about participation, engagement and collaboration centred on students. Another highlighted the absence of variables such as perceived self-efficacy and the perceived control a future teacher has over the possibility of using these dynamics, a factor with direct influence on behaviour. Following this feedback, the researchers added new items, reworded others and reframed emotional experience items within the specific context of the group techniques trainees had encountered during their master’s coursework.

A second round of expert judgement confirmed the improvements. All items achieved Aiken’s V values above .71 in the lower bound of their confidence intervals, with sixteen items exceeding .80 and nine approaching the maximum. Overall agreement for the entire instrument reached an exceptional .93, and the adequacy of all three subscales was judged satisfactory. With content validity secured, the researchers turned to the field: 441 students, 161 men and 280 women, enrolled on the master’s programme at a Spanish university during the 2020/2021 academic year completed the questionnaire. This represented 61.33 percent of the total enrolment, with a mean age of 27.6 years and a strong representation of Arts and Humanities backgrounds at nearly half the sample.

The statistical analysis revealed both strengths and weaknesses in the draft instrument. Initial reliability coefficients were respectable, with Cronbach’s alpha at .853 and McDonald’s omega at .870, the latter being the preferred estimator for ordinal data. However, item-total correlation analysis flagged three items falling below the .300 threshold, indicating they contributed nothing to internal consistency. These items were removed, leaving a refined fifteen-item scale whose reliability improved to alpha of .871 and omega of .883, with all three subscales exceeding .700. The researchers then subjected the refined scale to confirmatory factor analysis, and the results were compelling: sampling adequacy was excellent with a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value of .915, and the three-factor model showed a good fit with a comparative fit index of .929, a Tucker-Lewis index of .914 and a root mean square error of approximation of .063, all within accepted benchmarks.

One of the study’s most technically sophisticated contributions is the multigroup analysis examining whether the instrument functions equivalently for men and women. Previous research had suggested that female trainees show greater willingness to adopt active methodologies, raising the question of whether a single questionnaire could fairly measure the construct across both groups. The researchers tested four increasingly constrained structural equation models, from an unconstrained baseline through measurement weights, structural covariances and measurement residuals. The measurement weights model, which assumes that the weight of each item on its factor is identical across groups, provided the best fit. All regression weights were statistically significant for both sexes, and factor correlations exceeded .797 for women and .829 for men, supporting factorial invariance and confirming that the scale measures the same construct in men and women.

The practical implications extend well beyond psychometrics. The authors argue the instrument could support selection and guidance processes for admission to the master’s programme, complementing interviews and other tests in line with recommendations from the OECD and the European Commission about attracting better-qualified teaching candidates. Within the programme itself, the scale can identify different dispositional profiles, allowing educators to tailor support for trainees who are sceptical, anxious or merely unfamiliar with group methods, and to stimulate emotional self-awareness and reflection on the advantages and disadvantages of group techniques in secondary education. Perhaps most powerfully, the instrument enables pre-post research designs: administering it before and after the master’s course would allow programmes to demonstrate empirically whether they succeed in fostering the attitudes that drive methodological change.

The researchers are candid about the limitations of their work. The sample was drawn from a single university using convenience sampling, which may limit generalisability, and self-selection bias could have under-represented less engaged students. Arts and Humanities students were over-represented while Health Sciences accounted for barely seven percent of participants. As a newly developed instrument, the results remain provisional, and the authors call for replication with representative nationwide samples, application to in-service teachers, and further construct validity evidence using techniques such as exploratory structural equation modelling. Nevertheless, the study delivers something teacher education has long lacked: a validated, theoretically grounded and sex-invariant measure of whether future secondary teachers are genuinely prepared to abandon lecture-based transmission in favour of the interactive, group-centred classrooms that educational policy has demanded for decades. In an era when student motivation and participation are central concerns, knowing not just what trainees can do but what they are willing to do may prove the decisive metric.

Subject of Research: Design and validation of a questionnaire measuring pre-service secondary teachers' willingness to use group dynamics techniques

Article Title: Assessing the willingness of Spanish pre-service secondary school teachers to use group dynamics techniques. Design and validation of an instrument

Article References: Palomero-Fernández, P., & Vicente-Sánchez, E. (2025). Assessing the willingness of Spanish pre-service secondary school teachers to use group dynamics techniques. Design and validation of an instrument. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 14(1), Article 16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00037-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00037-w

Keywords: teacher training, group dynamics, psychometrics, instrument validation, active learning, pre-service teachers, secondary education, tripartite model of attitudes, confirmatory factor analysis, factorial invariance, Spain, educational research