Teaching Ability Beliefs Scale: Adapting into Turkish and Testing the Construct Validity

This research aims to adapt the Teaching Ability Beliefs Scale (TABS, Fives & Buehl, 2008, 2013) used for determining the teaching ability beliefs of individuals into Turkish language and culture in addition to testing the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of the scale. Briefly, this research seeks for a scale to question the teaching ability from the perspective of ‘nature versus nurture’. The research was carried out using the data obtained from 270 teachers and 274 pre-service teachers. After the translation of the items in the scale and testing the translation validity, language and meaning validity, construct validity (exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses) and internal consistency have been examined. The results obtained indicated that the scale has three factors as (i) innate, (ii) learned, and (iii) hybrid and that the scale was valid and reliable for the Turkish culture. Two factors of the original scale which are requires polish and either resulted in the hybrid factor of the adapted scale. As a result, it can be inferred that the findings have evidential value for TABS to be used in identifying the teaching ability beliefs of teachers and pre-service teachers