Chapter 4: Defining, Measuring, and Validating Teacher and Collective Responsibility

Teacher and collective responsibility are often considered crucial to increasing student achievement, but there are few studies that investigate their meaning, measure, and relationship to each other and to student achievement. Part of this scarcity derives from the lack of strong, valid, and reliable measures of teacher and collective responsibility. To address these gaps, this study tested the reliability and validity of scores on newly developed measures of teacher and collective responsibility. Our measure of teacher responsibility was designed to assess teachers’ willingness to accept or reject responsibility for their own students’ learning while our measure of collective responsibility taps teachers’ perceptions of the responsibility accepted by their colleagues. Findings indicate strong reliability for scores on the collective responsibility scale and adequate reliability for scores on the teacher responsibility scale. In addition, correlational and hierarchical linear model analyses indicate concurrent validity for scores on both scales. At the school level, collective responsibility is positively and significantly related to the proportion of students passing a state assessment in math, thereby suggesting its predictive validity. This study thus provides new knowledge about the measurement of two constructs that are elusive in empirical research but ubiquitous in discussions of school effectiveness and educational policy.