Validating an Instrument for Teachers' Acceptance of Artificial Intelligence in Education

TL;DR

This study developed and validated a reliable instrument to measure teachers' acceptance of AI in education, addressing previous limitations in instrument quality and providing a comprehensive, psychometrically sound tool.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new, validated instrument for assessing teachers' acceptance of AI, with strong evidence of its reliability and validity across multiple dimensions.

Findings

The instrument has five validated dimensions.

The scale consists of 27 items with high reliability.

The instrument demonstrates strong construct and validity evidence.

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) receives wider attention in education, examining teachers' acceptance of AI (TAAI) becomes essential. However, existing instruments measuring TAAI reported limited reliability and validity evidence and faced some design challenges, such as missing informed definitions of AI to participants. This study aimed to develop and validate a TAAI instrument, with providing sufficient evidence for high psychometric quality. Based on the literature, we first identified five dimensions of TAAI, including perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, behavioral intention, self-efficacy, and anxiety, and then developed items to assess each dimension. We examined the face and content validity using expert review and think-aloud with pre-service teachers. Using the revised instrument, we collected responses from 274 pre-service teachers and examined the item discriminations to identify outlier items. We employed the confirmatory factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha to examine the construct validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and reliability. Results confirmed the dimensionality of the scale, resulting in 27 items distributed in five dimensions. The study exhibits robust validity and reliability evidence for TAAI, thus affirming its usefulness as a valid measurement instrument.