Exploring Instructional Leadership Practises Items Among Headmasters in Public Primary Schools: An Exploratory Factor Analysis

As stated in most of the instructional leadership literature, school leadership affects teacher learning. The concept of instructional leadership has evolved through school effectiveness around the 1980s and considers school leaders important in promoting teacher knowledge to student learning. However, instructional leadership cannot be implemented to the maximum due to constraints of practising the function of instructional leadership, lack of practice and unpreparedness in carrying out their role as instructional leaders. This study aims to validate an instructional leadership instrument utilising


Introduction
Three decades of research have emphasised the importance of instructional leadership in the effectiveness and improvement of schools (Mestry et al., 2013;Salo et al., 2015).Since the early 1980s, leadership studies have changed from an emphasis on general leadership to a focus on specialised styles of leadership (Lai et al., 2017;Pan et al., 2015).One of these is instructional leadership, which focuses on promoting best practices, such as evaluation and improvement in teaching (Ng et al., 2015;Pan et al., 2015;Robinson et al., 2008;Salo et al., 2015).The role of school leaders as instructional leaders in ensuring school excellence is relevant and officially documented in the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025(Abdul Rahim et al., 2020).
Instructional leadership is defined as leaders' initiatives and efforts to improve student learning progress.For example, this includes constructing a school vision, channelling resources to implement learning, implementing teacher supervision and evaluation, organising staff development programmes, and fostering teacher relationships and collaboration (De Bevoise, 1984).The same may be said for Glasman (1984) simple definition: an endeavour by school leaders to foster and build a school culture that emphasises instructional practises that can increase student academic achievement.Although different studies define instructional leadership differently (Hallinger, 2003;Qian et al., 2017;Robinson et al., 2008), it is generally defined as a leadership function that supports teaching.It can be done by creating a learning environment with minimal disruption and high expectations for teachers and students (Anderson, 2008;Hallinger & Murphy, 2013;Hattie, 2009;Murphy, 1988;Neumerski, 2013).
With the rise of educational reforms worldwide in the twentieth century and increased awareness of school effectiveness and standards-based accountability systems, instructional leadership garners increased attention (Hallinger & Walker, 2017;Hou et al., 2019;Pan et al., 2015).It also had a high empirical effect on teaching outcomes across all leadership types (Hallinger & Wang, 2015;Zheng et al., 2017).According to Robinson and colleagues' meta-analysis study, the effect of instructional leadership is three to four times the influence on learning outcomes (Robinson et al., 2008).Apart from that, studies on instructional leadership have a positive effect on school improvement and student accomplishment (Hallinger, 2013;Park & Ham, 2014).According to Gibbs (2015), altering teachers' minds to accept change and making the school an organisation that leads teaching cannot happen without effective instructional leaders.This is because the responsibility of school leaders has shifted from simply administering the school to encouraging learning (Kim & Lee, 2020), ensuring learning quality (Gibbs, 2015), and providing professional development and learning opportunities for all teachers (Jameela Bibi Abdullah et al., 2020;Kalaichelvi & Aida Hanim, 2020).
Although instructional leadership is crucial in the school organisation, it is observed that leadership cannot be implemented to the maximum due to the constraints of practising the function of instructional leadership (Mohd Yusri & Wan Ismail, 2015).This is because school leadership is tasked with responsibilities, expectations and workloads, making the leadership more complex and unmanageable (Pollock et al., 2015;Winemiller, 2019).On the other hand, Pollock et al. (2015) and Abdul Rahim et al. (2020) summarise that school leadership spends a lot of time with school management and administration, budget, and internal and external school management.However, school leadership only pays little attention to coordinating the curriculum subject to the national curriculum (Hallinger & Walker, 2017).In addition, the lack of instructional leadership practices is due to leadership experiencing pressure on personal responsibility and accountability for school performance (Harris et al., 2017).Hence, they rarely take responsibility for leading learning.This causes them to be unprepared to carry out their role as instructional leaders (Al-Mahdy et al., 2018) and often assign the responsibility of school instructional leadership to other parties (Hallinger & Walker, 2017).Hallinger et al. (2018) discovered 120 research in Malaysia utilised the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS) as a data collection instrument.Note that 90% of which were done since 1985 describe this tool as a wide-angle lens for assessing leadership's contribution to teaching improvements.According to Siti Noor Ismail et al. (2018), despite its age, PIMRS is still used since validation studies revealed that it meets high-reliability standards.PIMRS has three domains which are 1) defining school goals, 2) managing instructional programs and 3) promoting school climate (Hallinger & Murphy, 1985).
This study aims to study the variable involved in instructional leadership by validating an instructional leadership instrument using EFA.This instrument can then be applied for further research to fill the instructional leadership gap.

Objective
This research aims to investigate and determine the factor structure of an instrument developed by the researcher to assess instructional leaders' practises concerning teaching teachers' competence in public primary schools.The study's spesific objectives are as follows: i.To assess the appropriateness and interpretability of the items measuring the constructs of instructional leadership practises; and ii.To evaluate the reliability and validity of instructional leaders' practises in teaching teachers' competence in public primary schools.
Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025 clearly states policies concerning instructional leadership (Ministry of Education Malaysia, 2013).School leaders must understand and practise instructional leadership, and policymakers must consider the study's findings to recognise the need for instructional leadership upskilling.

Defining the School Mission
The first dimension, defining the school mission, refers to school leaders who are seen as needing to ensure school staff cooperation in sharing a clear school mission and translating that mission into reality (Bennis & Nanus, 1985).McEwan (1998) defines goals as leaders' visions of the future based on beliefs, experiences, and values.Meanwhile, Schwahn and Spady (1998) and Johnson (2006) define goals as a clear and concrete picture of the organisation's achievements and the ability to translate goals into reality.Hallinger and Wang (2015) and Abdul Rahim et al. (2020) stated that leaders must focus on a clear mission and goal with the support and collaboration of teachers because it can affect learning and the quality of teaching in schools.It is also the leader's role to define and communicate the school's goals.This serves as the foundation for the school's aims and provides a clear understanding that is widely supported by all school members (Ghavifekr et al., 2019;Hallinger & Hosseingholizadeh, 2020).Based on the discussion above, formulating and communicating school goals is an essential function under the domain of instructional leadership based on the literature review and previous studies.

Managing Instructional Programmes
The second dimension is managing instructional programmes, which refers to instructional leadership's actions and focuses on developing, coordinating, and monitoring curriculum and teaching matters (Hallinger et al., 2017;Hallinger & Hosseingholizadeh, 2020;Hallinger & Murphy, 1985).Gawlik (2018) defines this second dimension by including three responsibilities: supervising and evaluating instruction, coordinating the curriculum, and monitoring student progress.As a result, instructional leadership should be involved in organising and developing teaching quality, monitoring student achievement, and making adjustments to promote success.In addition, this dimension's instructional leadership function emphasises using feedback to build the teacher's instructional capacity (Hallinger & Hosseingholizadeh, 2020).Consequently, instructional leaders must be informed about teaching, committed to school development, and accountable for providing effective feedback (Hallinger & Walker, 2017;Hallinger & Wang, 2015;Ng et al., 2015).According to Roslizam Hassan et al. (2018), this is the most challenging work that school leaders must face because curriculum and teaching are the core functions of a school.Therefore, failure to manage the instructional programme efficiently and effectively will lead to a failure to achieve the anticipated results in terms of student academic progress.
Overall, the second dimension, managing the instructional program with threedimensional functions, namely curriculum coordination, supervising and evaluating instruction and strengthening student progress, is seen as an important dimension and a challenge for the school's instructional leadership in realising the curriculum and teaching as the core of a school.

Promoting School Climate
Promoting school climate is the third dimension.It explains the role of school leaders in motivating and assisting teachers and students in participating in effective school activities (Hallinger et al., 2017).The third dimension according to Hallinger (2011b), refers to the norms and attitudes of teachers and students that influence the learning process at school.School leaders should directly or indirectly create a school climate to facilitate communication and provide a discussion platform for approaching teachers and students.Similarly, they should create a reward system to increase productivity, establish clear standards that include school expectations, and participate in development programmes for school members in line with the school's mission.Furthermore, leaders must foster a culture of continuous growth and recognition aligning with school goals and procedures (Hallinger & Murphy, 1985;Hallinger & Walker, 2017).According to Gawlik (2018), instructional leaders always aim to improve the school climate, believing that a successful climate results from a collaborative concentration and focus on teaching.
In conclusion, the third dimension promotes school climate with six functions complementing the previous two dimensions, which are defining the school's mission and managing the instructional program.The researcher in the study utilises all these dimensions to analyse the level and relationship between other variables.

Theoretical Framework
Several new concepts and theories in educational leadership have emerged over the last 25 years.Among these is instructional leadership, which has been studied extensively (Heck & Hallinger, 1999).In contrast to school administrators' use of leadership models such as situational leadership, trait theory, and contingency, the instructional leadership model focuses explicitly on how leadership implemented by school leadership and teachers leads to better results (Leithwood et al., 2020).Early research on effective schools led to the development of the instructional leadership model in the early 1980s (Hallinger, 2003).According to the study, strict curriculum-focused instruction and instruction from leaders are useful features in teaching students (Edmunds, 1979;Leithwood & Montgomery, 1982).In the 1980s and early 1990s, this model shaped effective leadership thinking and became the preferred model of academic leadership (Hallinger, 1992;Hallinger & Wimpelberg, 1992).Hallinger and Murphy (1985) developed the most widely used instructional leadership model.This model proposes the instructional leadership construct in three dimensions: defining the school mission, managing the instructional programme, and promoting the school climate.The first dimension, determining goals, must be emphasised.The leader does not determine goals alone but must ensure that the school has a clear mission and communicate it to the staff (Hallinger & Murphy, 1985).The second dimension, managing the instructional programme, focuses on curriculum and teaching coordination and control.This dimension includes three leadership functions: supervising and evaluating instruction, curriculum coordination, and student progress monitoring.This dimension clearly indicates that leaders must be deeply involved in instructional development.However, it should be highlighted that leaders cannot be the only ones involved in instructional development, particularly in large schools.This model demonstrates that the academic core is the responsibility of the school's main leadership (Hallinger & Murphy, 1985).Finally, the third dimension of promoting a positive school learning climate includes several functions: protecting instructional time, promoting professional development, being visible, providing incentives for teachers, and providing incentives for students.This dimension is broad in scope and function, encompassing the role of leadership in creating a learning environment to ensure school effectiveness (Hallinger, 2003).
In conclusion, this instructional leadership model was chosen because it coincided with this study, which examines the role of school instructional leadership through the guidance cycle of teachers' teaching competencies.Other than that, this instructional leadership model is a reference in studying the three dimensions involved.

Conceptual Framework
The researcher refers to the study of instructional leadership by Hallinger and Murphy (1985) to determine the domain for the construct of instructional leadership, which is a further study of the development and the relevance of the PIMRS (Hallinger & Murphy, 1985).As shown in Figure 1, instructional leadership consists of three domains: 1) defines the mission; 2) manages instructional program; and 3) promotes school climate (Hallinger, 2011a(Hallinger, , 2011b)).Several studies that employed the same domain in their study that supported the choice of this domain were Hallinger dan Walker (2017), Roslizam Hassan et al. (2018), andThien (2020).In summary, the researcher conducted an adaptive study in the domain of instructional leadership.
Figure 1: The Conceptual Framework of the Instructional Leadership

Methodology
The description in this section is related to the methodology that relates population and sampling in the pilot study, instrument, factor analysis, and reliability analysis.

Pilot Study
Previous studies' survey questions were adapted and modified.This study has selected and adapted the instruments developed by Hallinger and Murphy (1985) for their respective fields of study and modified a number of statements to be compatible with the field of study being conducted.Furthermore, two language experts and six content experts reviewed and assessed this study's constructs and study items.Following that, a pilot study was carried out to improve the research instrument's validity and adequacy.
A pilot study should be conducted to improve field research quality and efficiency by determining the content validity of instrument items, providing an initial assessment of item consistency, and improving the format and item questions.(Creswell & Creswell, 2018;Sorzano et al., 2017).According to Kline (2015) and Zainuddin Awang (2015), the number of suitable respondents in the pilot study to determine the reliability of the questionnaire instrument is between 25 and 100.To collect quantitative data, the researcher utilised a cross-sectional questionnaire survey.This study collects data on the instructional leadership of public primary schools as it relates to instructional leadership practises using a descriptive method, 137 teachers were chosen at random from 15 public primary schools and given self-administered questionnaires.

Instrument
The research instruments used were prepared in Malay.Meanwhile, the adapted questionnaire was prepared in English and translated into Malay using back-to-back translations, as suggested by (Son, 2018) leadership practises in public primary schools toward teacher teaching competency, all questionnaires used a 5-point interval scale Likert questions ranging from "1 = Strongly Disagree" to "5 = Strongly Agree."

Factor Analysis
This study employed factor analysis to create a valid component and suggest the best elements for each component (Sekaran & Bougie, 2016).Using the pilot result, the researcher decided to perform EFA on the items that measure each construct.According to Zainuddin Awang (2015), if a researcher adapts previous researchers' instruments and modifies statements into new items, they must perform the EFA procedure.This is especially important when the current field of study differs significantly from the previous field in which the instrument was built and validated, especially when there are differences in population, culture, languages, or time lapses.The previous result may have differed and may no longer be appropriate for the current environment.For this reason, the researcher used Bartlett's test to presume the possibility of factor analysis stability and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test to determine sample size adequacy for analysis.Apart from that, Kaiser's criterion (Eigenvalue) has also been used to keep a factor or component with one or more eigenvalues (Kaiser, 1960).Eigenvalues are values assigned to each factor that represent the amount of variance in each item that that factor can explain (Pallant, 2016).Catell's scree test entails plotting each factor's eigenvalue and examining the plot to determine the point at which the curve's shape changes direction and becomes horizontal (Cattell, 1966).Subsequently, the next step was to extract factors using the varimax rotation method, as recommended by Gaskin and Happel (2014), because this method obtains factors based on the correlation between items.The following section summarises the communalities by explaining how much variation exists in each item (Pallant, 2016).Note that IBM-SPSS version 25 was used for the EFA.

Reliability
Hair et al. ( 2014) refer to the degree to which the variable measures the true value with no error (error-free).Therefore, this step will show higher consistency and reliability if the measurement is repeated.Cronbach's Alpha coefficient is a commonly used test for determining consistency reliability (Chua, 2020;Creswell, 2014).On the other hand, Chua (2020) recommends a Cronbach's Alpha value range of 0.65 to 0.95, which is sufficient.

Instructional Leadership Construct Descriptive Statistics
A questionnaire with 62 items was used to assess the instructional leadership construct with a scale of "1 = Strongly Disagree" to "5 = Strongly Agree."The items of instructional leadership were coded DM1 to SC62.Table 1 displays the descriptive outcome of each item that measures the construct.The mean value for each item ranged from 4.12 to 4.66, with a standard deviation (SD) ranging from 0.492 to 0.966.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) Result
Only 42 of 59 items were recognised in evaluating instructional leadership following an EFA approach and the validity and reliability process..000 Table 3 presents three Eigen values greater than one, accounting for 66.164% of the variance in the analysis factor, surpassing 60 percent as the minimum percentage of allowable variance in the analysis factor for the construct to be valid.Three component with a total variance of Component 1 contributed 25.338%, Component 2 contributed 24.690%, and Component 3 contributed 16.135%.The scree plot for the instructional leadership constructs separates these 42 items into three components (Figure 2).An examination of the scree plot reveals an obvious point of inflation following the third factor.

Analysis of Reliability in Instructional Leadership
Table 6 represents the final test, in which the reliability estimates for the underlying constructs of instructional leadership implementation.The reliability index ranges from 0.921 to 0.970, indicating that all the items in this construct are highly plausible and acceptable.Overall, the 42 items utilised to assess instructional leadership have a reliability value of 0.948, indicating that they are excellent for measuring the construct.

Discussion and Conclusion
The three-factor structure of the instrument for instructional leadership practises explained 66.164% of the variance in the relationship pattern between items.According to our EFA, Component 1 contributes 25.338%, Component 2 contributes 24.690%, and Component 3 contributes 16.135%.Hence, all three component factors are extremely reliable (all Cronbach's > .7).There are 42 instructional leadership practises in total: DM (7 items), IP (20 items), and SC (15 items).As a result of this study, the three-factor structure of the instructional leadership practises instrument was confirmed.
Furthermore, the data included in this study has been confirmed to be suitable for conducting valid EFA based on descriptive statistical analysis.According to Kline (2016), a sample size of 137 students is sufficient for EFA to be conducted.Therefore, the appropriate number of respondents in a pilot study utilising EFA to determine the reliability of the questionnaire instrument is between 25 and 100.
The rotated component matrix results for the instructional leadership construct revealed that 42 items out of 59 have factor loadings greater than 0.5.Items 7,8,9,11,29,35,40,41,43,45,47,49,51,55,56,57,and 58 are among the 17 with factor loading values less than 0.5.The remaining 42 items are divided into three categories.However, four items from the component: IP have attempted to enter the component SC based on the results rotated component matrix, which are IP23, IP30, IP31, and IP32.According to respondents' understanding of instructional leadership practises in Malaysia, these four items are more inclined to the SC component.
This study examines the instrument's reliability and validity during the first phase of the instrument development process.Based on the EFA results of this study, educators or administrators can apply these instructional leadership practices as a tool to study.This is to observe the understanding and level of instructional leadership ability of HMs for public primary schools in measuring and implementing the three components of instructional leadership, namely DM, IP, and SC.
Other than that, this instrument can provide instructional leadership with a greater understanding of the level of instructional leadership practice in schools.This makes them more sensitive and prepared to carry out their responsibilities by attending training to help improve their ability.Instructional leaders must improve their knowledge and skills to contribute to developing a positive school culture that promotes open communication channels, trust, cooperation, and a higher level of readiness for change.Moreover, instructional leadership necessitates adequate training before being appointed and throughout their service, particularly during the first three years.
International research also indicates that this period is critical in developing leadership style and instructional leadership skills.However, more research is required to investigate the relationship between latent and manifest variables using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Limitations and Recommendations
First, this study only includes respondents from national schools.No respondents are from national high schools, private schools, or international primary schools.Second, this study employs a quantitative research approach by distributing a questionnaire to the participants.Third, the teachers who participated in this study were randomly chosen from schools in Negeri Sembilan.Nonetheless, the sample size from this pilot study is adequate and valid.Fourth, statistical methods to study's construct validity and an instrument are the limitations of the analysis technique in which EFA is utilised.However, EFA alone is insufficient to test the instrument's theoretical foundations.To advance knowledge in this area, CFA should be performed.
It is suggested that future research include respondents from public secondary schools, private primary schools, or international schools.In addition, further research can be conducted employing a qualitative approach, including informant interviews, to obtain more detailed data on instructional leadership practices.Other than that, respondents were also chosen randomly by involving more districts or states for generalisation.Finally, CFA is required for further research to verify theories or hypotheses related to the basic structure of variable groups using structural equation modelling (SEM) (Hair et al., 2017).

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Scree Plot for Instructional Leadership Construct

Table 1 :
Descriptive Statistics for Instructional Leadership Items

Table 2 :
Table 2 displays the KMO and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity for the 42 items instructional leadership construct.KMO and Bartlett's Test for Instructional Leadership

Table 3 :
Total Variance Explained for the Instructional Leadership

Table 4 :
Rotated Component Matrix for Instructional Leadership.

Table 5 :
Communalities for Instructional Leadership

Table 6 :
Reliability Analysis for Instructional Leadership