Communicative-cognitive activation in primary EFL education: Psychometric evidence on a novel subject-specific student scale

Most research into instructional quality has been conducted in the context of STEM education, with issues relating to subject-specificity being addressed explicitly only recently. Subject-specific approaches might increase validity by capturing aspects of instructional quality that generic frameworks fail to acknowledge. This is particularly true for cognitive activation, which is largely dependent on the lesson content. We present psychometric evidence on the validity of a scale designed to assess students’ perception of cognitive activation in English as a foreign language education at primary level. Drawing on a sample of 513 German 4th graders (49% female, M age =10 years, SD=0.59), we investigated the construct and criterion validity of a novel scale. We confirmed our theoretical model of communicative-cognitive activation, which included one general factor and six specific factors. Communicative-cognitive activation and its subdimensions are, to some extent, positively related to other generic dimensions of instructional quality, such as classroom management and student support. However, findings on the relation between communicative-cognitive activation and students’ EFL reading proficiency are inconclusive.