Reliability and Validity of Questionnaire for Preschool Teachers in Music Teaching Ability: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Music activities in early childhood foster measurable gains in cognition, language and socio-emotional regulation. Yet many preschool teachers feel ill-equipped to design developmentally appropriate and culturally responsive lessons. Addressing the lack of psychometrically robust instruments that capture this multidimensional competence, this present pilot study developed and evaluated a 23-item questionnaire grounded in Shulman’s pedagogical-content-knowledge framework and organised around three domains: Teaching Skill, Teaching Method and Teaching Evaluation. A quantitative cross-sectional survey was administered to 50 music-teaching staff from five kindergartens in Liaocheng City, selected through purposive convenience sampling. Internal consistency, content validity and construct validity were analysed in SPSS 28. Cronbach’s alphas confirmed excellent reliability (?_TS = 0.938; ?_TM = 0.909; ?_TE = 0.921), while expert review yielded an S-CVI/Ave of 0.97 and identified only two items for minor revision. Factorability diagnostics were satisfactory (KMO = 0.759; Bartlett’s ?²(253) = 845.44, p < .001) and principal-component analysis extracted three factors that explained 67.8% of total variance with primary loadings between 0.704 and 0.872 and negligible cross-loading. These results suggest that the new instrument offers a reliable and valid diagnostic tool for profiling teachers’ music-teaching competence. It supports targeted professional development and enabling rigorous evaluation of early-childhood music initiatives. Future work should employ larger, stratified samples and confirmatory factor analysis to test structural invariance across regions and longitudinally to examine how improvements in specific teaching domains translate into child outcomes.