Abstract

Professional judgement needs to be practiced by teachers in providing a holistic approach to assessing their students. However, the validation of the items to measure teachers' professional judgement is always questionable. Hence, this study examines the content validity of an instrument developed to assess professional judgement, a skill that needs to be mastered by Malaysian teachers, in parallel with the implementation of classroom-based assessment. Eight experts, consisting of four professionals and four lay experts, were selected to be involved in this study, which used the Content Validity Ratio (CVR) method. Only experts with certain criteria were being selected, such as experience, expertise and relevance to this study. The instrument consists of five constructs; each represents one of the elements of professional judgement respectively.  Starting with teachers' knowledge, followed by teaching experience, student's input, teachers' professional responsibility and teachers' intuition. A total of 102 items were assessed and 93 items met the critical CVR threshold of 0.75. This indicates strong agreement among experts regarding their suitability. The other nine items that did not meet this criterion were revised in terms of clarity, relevance and agreement with the theoretical constructs. This study makes a novel contribution by developing a culturally responsive instrument that is tailored to the Malaysian classroom assessment system and fills a significant gap in the measurement of teachers' professional judgement in local education policy and practice.