Developing a Situational Judgment Test for Admission into Initial Teacher Education in Oman: An Exploratory Study

With most selection practices for initial teacher education programmes (ITEPs) focusing on applicants’ cognitive attributes (academic records, subject knowledge, and so on), less attention is paid to evaluating applicants’ non-cognitive attributes such as motivation and resilience. Evidence indicating the role of non-cognitive attributes in teacher effectiveness and the limitations of the current selection tools points to a need for better selection measures. Initial results on the development of situational judgment tests (SJTs) for the selection of prospective teachers in the UK are promising (Klassen et al., 2014b, 2017b), encouraging further research in a wider range of contexts. The current study extends this work to the context of Oman and aims to (a) report the development process of an SJT for selecting ITEP applicants in Oman and (b) describe the initial evaluation of the developed SJT by exploring the test’s reliability and validity and applicants’ reactions to it. The research design consists of four phases. In Phase 1, the necessary non-cognitive attributes were explored with a convenience sample of key stakeholders (college tutors (n = 2), school principals (n = 74), supervisors (n = 63), teachers (n = 50)). The results suggested five non-cognitive domains. The domains were used in Phase 2 for developing an SJT with groups of working teachers (N = 116). The developed SJT was piloted in Phase 3 with a convenience sample of first year students (N = 171), and then implemented in Phase 4 with other criterion measures (N = 142). The results show that the developed SJT has good internal consistency (α = .75). The correlation between the SJT scores and other measures indicates that the SJT correlates significantly with two facets of the Big-Five personality measure; that is ‘conscientiousness’ (r = 0.29) and ‘agreeableness’ (r = 0.20). In addition, the SJT has a positive and significant correlation with the participants’ GPA (r = .31), and a negative (but non-significant) correlation with the scores of the interview currently used in the admission process (r = -0.17). The participants’ responses to the SJT content and use as a selection tool were positive. Recommendations for policy makers and for further studies are discussed.