Development and validation of early childhood care and education pre-service lecturer instrument

Abstract

This paper presents to develop and validate the Early Childhood Care and Pre-Service Lecturer Instrument constructed to determine their level of competencies toward the quality of early childhood carers-educators’ professionalism in Malaysia. Components which affect the early childhood quality were characterized through inclusive literature reviews alongside interviews conducted with experts and experienced lecturers. In this study, two experts were elected to review this instrument so as to enhance its validity while 70 more lecturers in Malaysia were involved. There are four scales in principal component analysis pertaining the quality of early childhood professionalism, namely: (1) disposition, (2) knowledge, (3) skills, and (4) practices. The component loading range or respective instrument item were between 0.56 and 0.79, while the range for respective scales the alpha reliability coefficient were between 0.90 and 0.94. Concisely, the findings from this study corroborated the weight and consistency of the ECCE Pre-Service Lecturer Instrument.