Adaptación y validación de la Student Teacher Professional Identity Scale en estudiantes de pedagogía chilenos.

The teacher professional identity is a construct that has gained the interest of numerous researchers in the field of teacher training, due to the abundant empirical evidence of its impact on job satisfaction and motivation, engagement, professional self-efficacy and decision-making in the educational practices of teachers. It is defined as a complex construction process that integrates personal identity and regulates the actions of teachers, acting as a basis for interpreting what teaching and learning is, guiding teaching action and organizing it for educational improvement. Despite the relevance of the teacher professional identity, the construction of this identity in preservice teacher and beginning teachers has not been empirically addressed sufficiently and exhaustively, a situation that is accentuated in the Latin American context. In Latin America, empirical studies on teacher professional identity have less development and along with this, quantitative studies aimed at measuring this construct are less, and to date there is no instrument in Chile that allows for adequate measurement of teacher professional identity. An instrument especially indicated to measure the teacher professional identity in preservice teacher is the Student Teacher Professional Identity Scale, an instrument that measures the teacher professional identity in preservice teacher considering the confidence in the professional choice, the sense of self-realization and the visualization of the profession as a mission and challenge. The Student Teacher Professional Identity Scale was developed and validated by Fisherman and Abbot in a sample of Israeli preservice teacher. It is a unifactorial and self-report scale, whose theoretical assumptions about teacher professional identity consider this construct as the attitudes of students to be teachers, the degree of identification with the role of teacher, confidence in professional choice, the sense of self-realization as teachers and the extent to which they see their profession as a mission and a challenge. The scale is based on 12 items and a Likert response alternative from 1 to 5. The objective of this study is to adapt and validate the Student Teacher Professional Identity Scale, in Chilean pre service teacher. Under a quantitative methodology, an instrumental study and a non-experimental cross-sectional design, a non-probabilistic and purposive non-proportional quota sampling of 663 students from 9 pedagogy majors at three Chilean universities was used. The Student Teacher Professional Identity Scale was translated into Spanish and culturally adapted. This instrument was applied together with the Professional Identity Scale and the Maslach Burnout Inventory Student Survey, for convergent and divergent validity, respectively. Scale reliability and construct validity were analyzed, based on convergent and divergent validity analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The results show that the scale presents adequate reliability (ω = .863), a positive and strong correlation with the Professional Identity Scale scores (r = .638) and a negative and moderate correlation with the Maslach Burnout Inventory Student (r = -.33) and correlation between moderate and null in all its dimensions (Efficacy factor r = -.419; Exhaustion factor r = -.083; Cynicism factor r = -.388), obtaining adequate convergent and divergent validity. Regarding the confirmatory factor analysis, based on Maximum Likelihood and Bootstrap, the original unifactorial model of the scale composed of 12 was the one that presented the best fit indicators (df = 53; χ² = 270.64; p = .000; GFI = .931, RMR = .039, IFI = .933, TLI = .903, CFI = .922, RMSEA = .079, AGFI = .899). In conclusion, a scale for measuring professional teaching identity in pre service teacher was obtained, adapted and validated for the Chilean context, with adequate psychometric characteristics. In the discussion, the results are analyzed in the light of the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]