ASSESSING THE INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERSHIP OF SECONDARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPALSIN THAILAND

While research in Western societies has found that principal leadershi p is usually a necessary condition for school improvement, there remai ns a dearth of research on how principals provide instructional leader ship in developing countries. This study sought to address this need b y adapting the PIMRS (Hallinger, 1984a), an instrument designed to ass ess principal instructional leadership. The PIMRS was translated and a dministered to 10 secondary school principals in northern Thailand. Fi ndings from this initial study indicate that the PIMRS-Thai Form appea rs to provide data on the instructional leadership of secondary school principals that meet or exceed common research standards of reliabili ty and validity. Researchers and practitioners interested in assessing principal instructional leadership in Thai schools can proceed to use the PIMRS-Thai Form with a reasonable degree of confidence that it wi ll yield accurate information on job performance in this domain. Consi stent with past studies, the principals in this study tended to rate t hemselves higher in their self-assessments than did their teachers (Ha llinger & Murphy, 1985; O'Day, 1983). Current and past data suggest th at greater credence be given to the teacher assessments. With this in mind, the results indicate that this sample of secondary school princi pals from northern Thailand exercised a low to moderate level of instr uctional leadership activity. Assessments of secondary school principa ls using the PIMRS in the United States (Haack, 1991), Malaysia (Saave dra, 1987), Canada (Jones, 1987) have all yielded significantly higher scores when compared with this Thai sample.