Literacy across the Disciplines: Development and Validation of an Instrument to Assess Literacy Instruction in Middle and High School Classrooms

Nationally published research suggests middle and high school educators are often experts within their respective disciplines, but they may be unprepared to effectively consider literacy needs and ways to incorporate literacy within their discipline. To better understand teachers’ perceived capabilities in their ability to teach and incorporate components of literacy within their classroom, we developed a survey to measure teacher self-efficacy in teaching content-area and disciplinary literacy. We explain the four stages of validation and provide examples of needed revisions to our survey. The survey was designed for immediate use with middle and high school teachers in South Carolina, but it could be used by any school, district, or state.