Developing a design thinking engagement scale for early childhood teachers

Engaging in design thinking activities has been increasingly viewed as important for the craft of teaching for early childhood practitioners. However, reliable and valid measurements for this are lacking. As such, this research aims to develop and validate a design thinking engagement scale (DTES) to assess teachers’ engagement in design thinking. A sample of 370 Chinese kindergarten teachers completed a questionnaire to test its reliability, validity and generality empirically. First, principal component analysis (PCA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) both supported a five-factor structure of the DTES, indicating satisfactory construct validity. The total variance explained in PCA was 85.48%. Second, the reliability analyses within each sub-dimension and for the total DTES also showed an adequate internal consistency for the scale, ranging from .89 to .92 in PCA, and .84 to .94 in CFA. Besides, at CFA, the composite reliability (ρ) (.84 to .94) also indicated a good reliability. Moreover, both good convergent validity and discriminant validity were obtained through the method of average variance extracted (AVE) for each dimension (.64 to .80) and constraining the correlations between each pair of constructs respectively. Thus, the DTES can be a promising tool for measuring design thinking engagement among early childhood teachers.