Assessing the Instructional Leadership of Secondary School Principals in Thailand

While research in Western societies has found that principal leadership is usually a necessary condition for school improvement, there remains a dearth of research on how principals provide instructional leadership in developing countries. This study sought to address this need by adapting the PIMRS (Hallinger, 1984a), an instrument designed to assess principal instructional leadership. The PIMRS was translated and administered to 10 secondary school principals in northern Thailand. Findings from this initial study indicate that the PIMRS-Thai Form appears to provide data on the instructional leadership of secondary school principals that meet or exceed common research standards of reliability and validity. Researchers and practitioners interested in assessing principal instructional leadership in Thai schools can proceed to use the PIMRS-Thai Form with a reasonable degree of confidence that it will yield accurate information on job performance in this domain. Consistent with past studies, the principals in this study tended to rate themselves higher in their self-assessments than did their teachers (Hallinger & Murphy, 1985; O'Day, 1983). Current and past data suggest that greater credence be given to the teacher assessments. With this in mind, the results indicate that this sample of secondary school principals from northern Thailand exercised a low to moderate level of instructional leadership activity. Assessments of secondary school principals using the PIMRS in the United States (Haack, 1991), Malaysia (Saavedra, 1987), Canada (Jones, 1987) have all yielded significantly higher scores when compared with this Thai sample.