Global competence scale: An adaptation to measure pre-service English teachers’ global competences

Abstract

Global competence is a comprehensive term referring to the interconnectedness of various constructs ranging from knowledge to values required to communicate, cooperate, and work towards the well-being of not only the local but also the global community. Teacher education has an important role in preparing teachers equipped with global competences. Therefore, having tools which can validly and reliably measure if and to what extent pre-service teachers are globally competent is a requisite. Hence, this study aimed at adapting and validating the Global Competence scale developed by Liu et al. (2020) to Turkish to measure pre-service English language teachers’ global competences and to obtain evidence regarding the psychometric properties of the scale to measure global competences in teaching and teacher education. The data collected from pre-service English language teachers (N=351) studying at various universities in Türkiye was divided into two equal halves. The first part of it was used to perform exploratory factor analysis which revealed an eight-factor 29-item structure. The second half which was used for confirmatory factor analysis yielded a good fit of a 25-item, eight-factor structure scale. The Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient (α= .88) and McDonald’s Omega (ω = .89) which indicated good internal consistency in the CFA dataset revealed excellent internal consistency (α= .90, ω = .91) in another independent dataset. Thus, the study revealed that the Global Competence scale has a good level of psychometric properties and reliability to measure pre-service English language teachers’ global competences in the Turkish context.