Teaching is a multidimensional and complex process. It requires vast knowledge and a deep understanding of many related areas. It includes different abilities such as synthesizing, integrating and then applying the acquired knowledge in different situations, in different conditions and with different groups of individuals. In quality teaching, this knowledge of the teacher is applied to provide those opportunities to the learners which will facilitate the learners to acquire and create new knowledge. In public schools, this concept of quality teaching is unequally found to serve the students.

Comprehensive and deep knowledge of the learning process is the foundation of quality teaching generally and knowledge about the theoretical basis of learning particularly. There are many facets of deep knowledge of the learning process such as having the ability to identify the basic principles and tenets of different particular perspectives to identify differences in practice perspective, to use those perspectives while planning learning experiences in different social contexts and to solve different problems related to the instructional and learning process. It is very important to understand how specific social contexts for learning and particular pedagogical approaches are associated and how particular theoretical perspectives of learning are associated with these two factors. It is also very important to know that strength of learning practices lies in the fact that how ideas are integrated into different subject matters when there is coherence, continuity and consistency while applying different theoretical perspectives (Hollins, 2011).

An effective assessment is a source for obtaining the evidence that the learners have these abilities such as to (a) connect the meaningful link between their daily experiences and the knowledge and practices which they obtain in different disciplines (b) connect those ideas which they obtain in different disciplines and then practically apply those ideas in novel and new situations (c) indulge their selves in those discipline-specific activities of truth-searching and ultimately become able to do some claims about determining its legitimacy (d) use all discursive practices of a discipline to represent and communicate the ideas (Duschl, 2008; Ford and Forman, 2006; Jordan, 2010). The basic purpose of this kind of assessment is to get ensured that either student has got deep knowledge of a specific discipline and has become able to apply that acquired knowledge and practices in a new and different situation. The purpose of this kind of assessment is also to measure that either teacher has all the important information on the basis of which some intervention would support eradicating misconceptions and correcting the misconceptions of others. Therefore it is essential that teachers should have the ability at the first point and to develop the appropriate assessment approaches at the second point to adopt those classroom activities which are trustworthy and have integrity, ultimately these activities will help the students to get consistent progress to achieve the expected learning outcomes (Graue and Johnson, 2011).

Today's global village concept of the whole world demands that school systems should adopt this intensity of change to compete and make their place in a global economy. In such a situation an effective performance appraisal system will help to meet these demands. This appraisal system will help to hold the employees accountable, address their underperformance and hence ultimately enhance their practices and performance (Zbar, Marshall, and Power, 2007). This concept of the appraisal system is the base of this quality teaching scale.

According to Aguinis's (2009) concept of performance, appraisal lies in an ongoing process which is used to identify, measure and develop an individual's performance according to the goals of an organization. In a broader sense, this same concept of appraisal system of an individual's performance may be applied in a system. There may be two aspects of the appraisal system. The first aspect is formative in nature. It focuses on the development of performances such as professional learning, career development and feedback. The second aspect is summative in nature which may include evaluation of performance for career progression, promotion or demotion and termination purposes.

Quality teaching scale is students' appraisal. The use of students' appraisal is relatively a new concept in the Pakistani context and it is mostly criticized. Arubayi (2003) observed that most people are reluctant to use students in appraising their teachers' quality of teaching and its effectiveness. Some critics raise the point that students are not mature enough to judge the quality and effectiveness of their teachers' teaching. Arubayi (2003) and Fauzier (2009) are in the favor of the use of students' appraisal. They say that irrespective of school background and academic level, students are in a better position than any other to appraise the quality and effectiveness of their teachers' teaching. Seldin (1996) said that if we want to know the taste of dinner then we should consider the opinion of those persons who ate dinner. The implication of this opinion here is that students' are the best source to determine the effectiveness and quality of instruction they are getting. Students' appraisal of the quality of teaching in elementary schools is a vital and effective tool for improving the quality of teaching. According to Arubayi (2003), quality teaching appraisal may serve the following three purposes

a. Helping administration to make decisions about tenure, promotion and pay increase on the basis of their performance appraisal.

b. Improving the quality of their teaching by providing them with feedback.

c. Guiding students to choose the better courses and instruction.

For improving the quality of teaching, it is

essential to know about those aspects which are strong and also about those aspects which could be further improved. Students' appraisal of their teachers' teaching is considered very important in getting the real picture of classroom instruction. Keeping in mind the importance of students' appraisal of their teachers' teaching performance, this research is aimed at developing and validating a quality teaching scale for elementary school teachers.

Statement of the Problem

Teachers are significant and the most important source in schools that play a vital role in raising educational standards. In order to improve the equity and efficiency of schools, teachers should be highly skilled, highly motivated to perform excellently and well aware of available sources. For this purpose, it is essential to have knowledge about the strength of teachers and also about those aspects of their professional life that can be improved and developed. From this perspective, the evaluation of teachers' performance is a basic step to improving the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning. This step improves the educational standards.

Monitoring teams of the ministry of education visit schools from time to time to evaluate and monitor the work of each teacher to improve the learning of students. But it is very difficult for the monitor to evaluate all teachers of schools while teaching in all classes and hence observing the quality of their instruction in a real classroom situation is almost not possible for them. Most of the time, to ease their work they prefer to check their lesson plans, attendance registers, diaries and other available sources. While evaluating the performance and quality of teachers' work, monitoring team members usually referred to those available records. These records in reality cannot give the real picture of teachers' instruction with their students in their classes.

Along with school records, a large number of instruments have been developed to measure and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of teachers' teaching. These instruments are mostly developed to be used by monitors and educational administrators or by teachers to rate the effectiveness of their teaching by themselves. When teachers are aware to be evaluated, they may create a false impression to impress the monitors or administrator. On the other hand, when teachers are asked to rate their performance, it is obvious that most of them rate themselves very highly. In such a situation, it becomes very difficult to get the true and real picture of the classroom instructional process.

Contrary to all those instruments, many researchers have developed instruments for students to appraise their teachers' performance to get a real and true picture of the classroom instructional process. This researcher also thinks that students are the right persons to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of their teachers' teaching because they are the persons who remain with them more than any other person.

Although there found many instruments for students to appraise their teachers' performances, some of them are outdated and some are scarce. Therefore researcher was motivated to develop and validate an instrument of quality teaching to get the real picture of classroom instruction pictures from the students' point of view. The researcher was instigating to conduct this research on the development and validation of quality teaching scales for elementary school teachers of the province of Punjab in Pakistan.

Purpose of the Study

The main purpose of the study was to develop and validate the Quality Teaching Scale for elementary schools' students to appraise their teachers' performance in the province of Punjab, Pakistan. This study was specifically carried out to:

1. Develop an instrument to measure the quality of teaching at elementary-level schools.

2. Measure the validity of the developed quality teaching scale.

3. Apply the Quality Teaching Scale to determine its reliability.

Research Questions

In order to guide the study, two research

questions were raised. These questions are stated as

1. How reliable is the developed Quality Teaching Scale?

2. How valid is the developed scale with respect to constructing validity?

A research design is comprised of various components of research (research approach, research design, and research method) that provide guidelines to answer the research questions (Myers, 2019; Creswell & Clark, 2017). A step-by-step plan and procedure that leads a researcher to collect, analyze and interpret the data is known as a research approach (Creswell & Creswell, 2017; Johnson & Christensen, 2019). There are three types of research approaches i.e. quantitative research approach (positivism paradigm), qualitative research approach (interpretive paradigm), and mixed methods research approach (pragmatism paradigm) (Christensen, Johnson, & Turner, 2014; Creswell & Clark, 2017, Johnson, 2010; Johnson & Christensen, 2014, 2019).

The quantitative research approach is used to test theories with the help of numerical data from a large sample size by examining the relationship among variables. Conversely, the qualitative research approach is used to build theories by gathering narrative data from a small sample size to explore and understand the behaviour of individuals naturalistically and holistically (Flick, 2018; Johnson & Christensen, 2014; Morgan, 2018). While, in a mixed-method research approach, the researcher integrates both types of quantitative (numerical) and qualitative (narrative) data by using distinct designs for theory-building as well as its testing in a specific context (Creswell & Clark, 2011, 2017). According to Creswell and Clark (2017), Johnson and Christensen (2014), and Myers (2019), the basic assumption of the mixed-method approach is to understand a research problem completely by combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches, as compared to either approach alone. Two types of decisions are involved to select a research approach i.e. procedures of inquiry (i.e. research designs) and particular research methods (collection of data, analysis techniques, and its interpretation) (Creswell & Clark, 2017; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011).

This study is casual comparative in nature. Data was collected through a quantitative research approach and was analyzed.

The population of this study consisted of students in 8th grade in Punjab province (Pakistan). In the public sector, there are separate schools for boys and girls. According to School Census 2018, of Punjab School Education Department, there are 3549 middle schools for boys and 4740 middle schools for girls. In boys, middle schools 14882 boys and in girls' middle schools 14243 girls are enrolled in the middle class. The number of teachers in these middle schools is 35225 males and 55352 females respectively. By using multistage stratified random sampling techniques 797 total students were selected as a sample from six districts of Punjab.

In this study, a multistage random sampling technique was used to select the sample from the target population. This sampling process consisted of three stages. In the first stage, six districts from the 36 districts of the province of Punjab were selected through stratified random sampling. This sampling was based on UNDP (United Nation Development Program 2015), PCA (Principal Component Analysis), EI (Education Index) by Khan (2015) and the Retention Rate of different districts of Punjab given by NGO Alif Alan (2016). According to these reports, three groups of six districts were selected. In each group, one district was representing a high EI, PCA, UNDP and Retention Rate while the second district was selected from that category which was representing the lowest EI, UNDP, PCA and Retention Rate. These six districts are Gujrat, Norowal, Hafizabad, Kasur, Jhang and Muzaffargarh. In these six districts, there are 521 Boys middle schools and 625 Girls middle schools according to Punjab School Development Census 2018.

In the second stage of sampling, two strata of 521 Boys Middle Schools and 625 Girls Middle Schools were selected through stratified random sampling. In these 512 Boys Middle Schools, 14882 boys were enrolled in the 8th class and in 625 Girls Middle Schools, 14243 girls were enrolled in the 8th class. A total of 29125 students were enrolled in the 8th class in these middle schools.

In the third stage, with the help of simple random sampling total of 797 middle-class students were selected according to John Curry's (1998) formula(rule of thumb) use of sample sizes 10 to 100 (100 %), 101 to 1000(10%), 1001 to 5000(5%), 5001 to 10000(3%),100000 or above then1%. These 797 students are 3% of their target population. Of these 797 students, 368 are boys and 411 are girls. The researcher constructed the instrument titled; "Quality Teaching Scale (QTS)".

Quality teaching instrument was developed according to those quality teaching indicators which are given by Terry Lovate (2005). These quality teaching indicators are

1. Explicit teaching

2. Effective feedback

3. Use of data to inform practices

4. Classroom management

5. Wellbeing

6. collaboration and

7. High expectation.

This instrument was consisting of two parts. The first part consisted of demographic variables of the study (i.e.) student's name (optional), school name, gender, school roll number, subject, and the number of students in that class. The second section was consisting of those items that were related to teachers' teaching practices, which were directly or indirectly related to his or her quality of teaching. Students were asked to respond on five points Likert-type scale (Strongly Disagree=1, Disagree= 2, Neutral=3, Agree=4, Strongly Agree=5). The judgement and quantification stage of the instrument began with face validation and the establishment of the reliability of the instrument. Research Question 1 was answered by using Cronbach Alpha Statistics while Research Question 2 was answered by using PLS-SEM.

The instrument was validated by one international, three assessment and evaluation experts of Pakistani Universities and five PhD scholars to confirm the overall design of the instruments, appropriateness of language, and its usability in the Pakistani context. In light of valuable comments, the researcher added demographical information and statements to each instrument. The instrument was again translated into the Urdu language with comparatively simple and easy-to-understand words because Urdu was the native language of the respondents.

The questionnaire was piloted on 200, 8th-grade students of the permissible school by the researcher. The researcher administered this pilot with the help of their teachers during their class time. All the protocol of questionnaire piloting was followed.

Research Question 1

How reliable is the developed instrument?

This research question was raised to determine how consistent the instrument (Quality Teaching Scale) is in producing consistent results when used for teachers' appraisal by their students. Cronbach Alpha Statistics was used in determining the reliability of the instrument. Cronbach Alpha was considered appropriate since the researcher was interested in determining the internal consistency reliability of the instrument. The summary is presented in Table 1.

Reliability

After piloting the study, reliability analysis was conducted to check the internal consistency of the instrument statements.

Exploratory Factor Analysis

Before conducting Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), the researchers first performed the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) test to measure the

adequacy of sampling, and performed the Bartlett Sphericity test to study the factor ability of the data.

Table 2. Kmo and Bartlet’s Test of Scale Quality Teaching

Table 2 presents KMO measure .758 indicating that data were sufficient for Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). Bartlett's test of Sphericity ?2 (2016) = 7708.517, p =.000 showed that there was a sufficient pattern relationship between the items.

Research Question 1

How reliable is the developed instrument?

This research question was raised to determine how consistent the instrument (Quality Teaching Scale) is in producing consistent results when used for teachers' appraisal by their students. Cronbach Alpha Statistics was used in determining the reliability of the instrument. Cronbach Alpha was considered appropriate since the researcher was interested in determining the internal consistency reliability of the instrument. The summary is presented in Table 1.

Reliability

After piloting the study, reliability analysis was conducted to check the internal consistency of the instrument statements.

Exploratory Factor Analysis

Before conducting Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), the researchers first performed the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) test to measure the

adequacy of sampling, and performed the Bartlett Sphericity test to study the factor ability of the data.

Table 2. Kmo and Bartlet’s Test of Scale Quality Teaching

Table 2 presents KMO measure .758 indicating that data were sufficient for Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). Bartlett's test of Sphericity ?2 (2016) = 7708.517, p =.000 showed that there was a sufficient pattern relationship between the items.

Scree Plot of Seven Factors of Quality Teaching Scale

Table 3. Pattern Matrix of Quality Teaching Scale

The Eigenvalue table has been divided into three sub-sections, i.e., Initial Eigen Values, Extracted Sums of Squared Loadings and Rotation of Sums of Squared Loadings. For analysis and interpretation purposes the researcher was only concerned with Extracted Sums of Squared Loadings. Using an eigenvalue cut-off of 1.0, there were seven factors the first factor accounted for 22.55% of the variance, the second 6.39%, the third 4.52%, and the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh 4.09,3.86,3.47 and 3.18 per cent of the variance respectively. The table shows the factor loading after rotation using a significant factor criterion of .40. The table shows that a total of 50 items are extracted, and the first and second each factor consisted of 10 items. The third factor consisted of 7 items and the fourth, fifth and sixth factors contained 6 items. The seventh factor consisted of 5 items.

The summary of the result in Table 2 indicated that Cronbach Alpha Statistics yielded an internal consistency reliability coefficient of 0.942 for the Quality Teaching Scale (QTS). According to Nachmias and Nachmias (2009), with a reliability coefficient of 0.7 and above, an instrument is considered reliable and the higher the coefficient, the more reliable the instrument. Therefore, the instrument was considered reliable for use by students in evaluating the teaching quality of teachers.

PLS-SEM CFA and Structural Model of Scale Quality Teaching

Research Question 2

How valid is the developed instrument with respect to constructing validity?

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed to establish the structural validity of scale by using the software Smart PLS.

The EFA extracted seven factors from Quality Teaching Scale (QTS).

Note. CR= Composite Reliability, AVE= Average Variance Extracted

Cronbach Alpha was used to determine the reliability of the instrument, which yielded a coefficient of 0.942. According to Nachmias and Nachmias (2009), a positive coefficient of over 0.7 is considered to be reliable, and the higher the coefficient the more reliable the instruments. Therefore, with a coefficient of 0.942, the instrument was considered reliable for use in appraising teachers' quality of teaching by their students. This result is similar to that of Akram and Zepeda (2015), who conducted a study to develop and validate a Self-assessment Instrument for Teacher Evaluation (SITE II) based on five National Professional Standards for Teachers developed by the Ministry of Education, Pakistan: subject matter knowledge, instructional planning and strategies, assessment, learning environment, and effective communication. The overall reliability of the questionnaire was found high (?=.94), and the instrument was considered reliable for use.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed to establish the structural validity of scale by using the software Smart PLS. The EFA extracted seven factors from Quality Teaching Scale (QTS). PLS-SEM results show a good fit of the model (SRMR=0.07, NFI= 0.93), which is acceptable. Latent variables correlation was examined, and the result showed that a significant correlation exists between factors (p<0.01). This is an indication of evidence of construct validity in the instrument. According to Kpolovie (2010), unlike the correlations found in or required for criterion-related validity, the correlation evidence for construct validity should be moderately high, but not too high. The AVE value of all constructs is greater than 0.5, indicating the convergent reliability of constructs. Cronbach Alpha and Composite reliability of constructs is above 0.7 indicating internal consistency of constructs. The discriminant validity was assessed by Fornell Larcker Criterion by comparing the square root of AVE of all constructs. The model of measurement supports the discriminant validity between constructs. All these results indicate that the construct validity of the instrument is evident.

Based on the findings of the study, it is concluded that the instrument, "Quality Teaching Scale" is a reliable and validated instrument for use in appraising teachers' quality of teaching in elementary schools in the province of Punjab, Pakistan.

Based on the findings of the study, it is concluded that the instrument, "Quality Teaching Scale" is a reliable and validated instrument for use in appraising teachers' quality of teaching in elementary schools in the province of Punjab, Pakistan.

Based on the findings of the study, the

following recommendations were made;

1. School administration should use the "Quality Teaching Scale" for appraising the performance of their teachers. In this way, they can get a clear and guanine picture of the classroom activities of a particular teacher.

2. To appraise their teachers, school administration should use QTS from time to time to get first-hand knowledge about the areas in which a teacher should be more developed.