THE DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF AN INVENTORY OF EFFECTIVE SCHOOL FUNCTION

For a sample of 124 teachers from 18 schools of the Distinguished Scho ols Group of the State of California, the major purpose of this invest igation was to construct and to validate a self-report instrument or m easure titled the Effective School Function Inventory that serves to o perationalize the major constructs and subconstructs of a conceptual m odel representing those activities hypothesized to be central to the e fficient operation of a school. An exploratory orthogonal factor analy sis of the intercorrelations of responses to the 39 Likert-type items of the inventory revealed four psychologically meaningful factors that exhibited only modest correspondence to the higher and lower order co nstructs underlying the conceptual model. These four factors were tent atively identified as revealing (a) Supportive Collegial Interaction, (b) Cooperative Facilitation of Goal Attainment in the Teaching-Learni ng Process, (c) Morally Oriented Leadership, and (d) Instructional Str ategy Sharing by Teachers.