The Development and Validation of the Practicing Faith Survey

Abstract

The Practicing Faith Survey (PFS) is a new assessment tool designed to measure the extent to which schoolchildren connect their faith to learning. PFS measures student engagement with five domains of Christian practice in connection with learning: intellectual, relational, introspective, benevolence, and formational practices. We describe the item-development process and then present evidence for the validity and reliability of the PFS based on a sample of 1,300 fifththrough twelfth-grade students who participated in a pilot of the instrument

Assessing Christian learning: Towards a practices-based approach to faith, vocation, and assessment

“…What kinds of practices might enact the vocation of a Christian student? Through a process of literature review, focus-group interaction with students, educators, and student life professionals, and the construction and validation of an assessment tool (Cheng et al., 2019), we sketched and refined five basic areas of practice that together provide contours of the vocation to live as a Christian who is a student. We propose the following as a workable map of Christian learning practices (Dykstra, 2005):…”

“…The initiative builds upon past Cardus work on assessing Christian school outcomes (Cardus, 2019; Green et al., 2016, 2018a, 2018b; Neven Van Pelt et al., 2012; Pennings et al., 2014) and the Kuyers Institute’s work on Christian pedagogical practices (DI Smith, 2018; DI Smith and Smith, 2011). At the time of writing, the PFS instrument has been successfully designed and validated (Cheng et al., 2019), a supporting website has been built, and the instrument is being piloted in North American schools. While the current iteration of the tool focuses primarily on secondary school students in Christian schools, we believe the approach to be relevant to other education settings.…”

The Assessment of Faith and Learning

“…This article forms part of a set of three papers which summarise the educational context, the conceptual framework and the design and validation process for the PFS (Cheng et al, 2019;Smith et al, 2019). In this paper we have argued that there is an urgent need for Christian schools to evaluate student faith formation as a practice of teaching and learning.…”

“…Other papers unpack the conceptual dimension of the project (Smith et al, 2019) and the design and validation of the survey (Cheng et al, 2019).…”