Psychometric Properties of the Principal Instructional Leadership Scale (PILS) in Saudi Arabia

BACKGROUNDS

The principal instructional leadership describes how school principals oversee the curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The main aims of the current study were translation and evaluation of the psychometric properties of the Principal Instructional Leadership Scale (PILS) in a Saudi Arabian population.

METHODS

The translation and cross-cultural adaptation process has been conducted in five stages, including forward translation, translation synthesis, backward translation, expert committee, and pilot testing. Face, content, construct, and convergent validity were used to establish validity. Cronbach's alpha coefficient and McDonald's omega (Ω) were used for internal consistency.

RESULTS

To validate the PILS structure, the total sample (N = 724) was randomly split into two subgroups, each comprising 362 individuals, for Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). Five factors obtained from EFA explain 71.07 % of the variance in PILS. The PILS encompasses domains of improving curriculum quality, teaching, and enhancing the effectiveness of adaptive learning, adding to the dimensions covered by previous instructional leadership measures. The five components show strong internal consistency (0.93 to 0.97). Both first-order and second-order CFAs confirmed the 5-factor model, meeting criteria (CFI > 0.91, GFI > 0.9, IFI > 0.9, RMSEA<0.05). All 21 items displayed suitable internal consistency (Cronbach's α > 0.8, McDonald's omega >0.7). Second-order average variance extracted validity (0.50) indicated PILS validity. Gender invariance analysis revealed no significant differences (∆CFI < 0.01, ΔRMSEA<0.01) in PILS structure between genders.

CONCLUSION

The reliability and validity of the Arabic rendition of PILS are commendable, making it suitable for evaluating principal instructional leadership in Saudi Arabia.

Determine the impact of Emotive Intelligent Spaces on children's behavioural and cognitive outcomes

This study aims to investigate the impact of a novel environmental intervention-Emotive Intelligent Spaces (EIS) on young children's self-regulation and working memory using a single-subject reversal design (ABAB). EIS is a semi-private space with coloured lights that could adapt to each child's preferred colour based on the child's self-reported emotional state. A total of 29 three-to-seven-year-old participants completed the experiment from fall 2020 to summer 2021. Self-regulation was measured by the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task; working memory was measured by the Woodcock-Johnson Numbers Reversed subset. Children's age was controlled as a covariate. Descriptive statistics indicated that the group means of self-regulation scores were higher in the intervention conditions. However, the group means of working memory scores were lower in the intervention conditions. We conducted repeated measure ANCOVA for the main analysis, and results showed no statistically significant differences in children's self-regulation and working memory scores between baseline and intervention conditions. It is recommended that future studies should take the illuminance level into consideration of the intervention effect. Further, our study implies that avoiding visual overstimulation in the classroom (e.g. heavily decorated walls) may create an optimal level of visual arousal and promote focused attention.

The Challenges of the Schooling from Cultural Psychology of Education

Education is in the core of societal change in all its different forms-from kindergartens to vocational schools and lifelong learning. Education-understood as goal-oriented personal movement-re-structures personal lives both inside school and outside the school. This special issue stems from the Cultural Psychology of Education (Marsico Culture & Psychology, 21(4), 445-454, 2015a, b, Journal for the Study of Education and Development, 40(4), 754-781, 2017)-a new approach to the field of education that examines how educational experience is culturally organized. This special issue is focused on the work of schooling as a crucial scientific arena to investigate. It is the follow up of an international workshop host by the Centre for Cultural Psychology (at Aalborg University, Demark) that was very thought provoking and from where several outcomes came out. Some of them are the papers here presented that tried to illuminate the different dimensions of the educational context in the East and West society with specific attention to the Chinese and Scandinavian educational practices. The dialogue between Chinese, European and North American scholars offered a complex view of the current educational challenges in the age of globalization. In this paper I try to focus on some of the most debated and challenging aspects in educational psychology worldwide: diversity, values and practical usability of psychology at school. I re-read these "hot topics" with the help of the themes developed by the authors of this special issue and in light of Cultural Psychology of Education. Then, I conclude by proposing a new agenda for the education of the future.