Internal structure and reliability of soft skills and teaching performance scales among university professors: exploratory psychometric evidence
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7298-9987
Measuring soft skills and teaching performance requires evidence on internal structure and score precision. The objective was to evaluate the internal structure and reliability of two scales administered to professors at a Colombian public university. An instrumental, quantitative, cross-sectional study was conducted with 200 professors who answered 46 items: 30 on soft skills and 16 on teaching performance. Descriptive statistics, floor and ceiling effects, corrected item-total correlations, Cronbach’s alpha, McDonald’s omega, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin index, Bartlett’s test, parallel analysis with 1,000 random matrices, and exploratory factor analysis based on polychoric correlations, principal-axis factoring, and oblimin rotation were calculated. The matrices showed adequate factorability for soft skills (KMO = 0.93) and teaching performance (KMO = 0.92), with significant Bartlett tests (p < 0.001). Overall internal consistency was high. Parallel analysis retained three factors for soft skills, explaining 56.97% of the variance, and two for teaching performance, explaining 61.38%. Cross-loadings, ceiling effects, and inadequate functioning of the reverse-worded item were observed. In conclusion, the scales show favorable precision, but their structure requires confirmation in independent samples before use in individual decisions.
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