Teacher’s exploration fostering scale: a scale development Study

Exploration plays a central role in young children’s learning, enabling them to engage with their environment, pose questions, test ideas, and construct understanding. However, researches on interaction quality suggest that the promotion of exploration – and the associated knowledge acquisition – is not sufficiently emphasized in German kindergartens. To address the need for a systematic assessment of how preschool teachers support exploration, this study aimed to develop a self-report instrument capturing the methods and extent to which teachers foster children’s exploration. The second objective was to establish the construct validity and reliability of the instrument, ensuring its suitability for use in educational research and professional practice. Two studies were conducted to validate the instrument. Study I aimed to identify the underlying structure of the questionnaire through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), based on a sample of N = 105 preschool teachers. Study II sought to confirm the factor structure identified in Study I using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) on an independent sample of N = 376, thereby providing further evidence of the instrument’s construct validity. In Study I, the EFA results supported a four-factor solution across 42 items. However, some items showed weaker loadings, indicating potential issues with model fit in subsequent analyses. In Study II, the initial 42-item, four-factor model could not be confirmed through CFA. After removing eight problematic items, the revised model demonstrated an acceptable to good fit. Fit indices support the structural validity of the TEFQ-34, while Cronbach’s alpha and Spearman-Brown coefficients confirm its reliability.