The College and Career Readiness Teacher Expectation Survey (CCR-TES)<\/strong> is a 33-item psychometric assessment instrument developed by Monahan et al. (2023)<\/a> designed to systematically quantify the postschool expectations that secondary educators hold for students with disabilities (SWD). Prior to the introduction of the CCR-TES, the psychometric literature on college and career readiness<\/a> (CCR) predominantly focused on general adolescent populations, individual student competencies, or objective academic milestones, frequently overlooking the profound systemic influence of educator expectations on postschool outcomes for exceptional learners. Originating from an initial 54-item conceptual pool derived from evidence-based CCR frameworks, the instrument synthesizes five core operational domains: Academic Engagement, Interpersonal Engagement, Process-Oriented Skills, Ownership of Learning, and Transition Competencies. Following content validation by an expert panel of transition researchers and practicing educators, the scale was administered to national samples of general and special education teachers across the United States. Although exploratory factor analysis initially identified a five-factor structure, marked factor intercorrelations and subsequent confirmatory factor analyses supported a parsimonious, robust unidimensional (one-factor) model comprising 33 retained items. The CCR-TES demonstrates exceptional internal consistency, yielding a McDonald\u2019s omega coefficient of 0.99 for the single-factor solution. Furthermore, multigroup confirmatory factor invariance testing substantiated configural, metric, and scalar invariance across both special education and general education instructional cohorts. The CCR-TES offers researchers, school psychologists, and secondary transition specialists an empirically validated, theoretically grounded measure to evaluate educator beliefs, benchmark intervention efficacy, and illuminate systemic expectations affecting secondary transition trajectories for students with disabilities.<\/p>\n College and Career Readiness, Teacher Expectations, Students with Disabilities, Transition Competencies, Special Education Teachers, Academic Engagement, Interpersonal Engagement, Ownership of Learning, Process-Oriented Skills, Psychometrics<\/p>\n The College and Career Readiness Teacher Expectation Survey (CCR-TES) was developed and validated through a collaborative scholarly initiative based primarily at the University of Connecticut’s Center on Postsecondary Education and Disability and collaborating institutions:<\/p>\n The primary purpose of the CCR-TES is to quantitatively evaluate secondary educators’ expectations regarding the postschool potential and functional readiness of students with disabilities (SWD) as they exit high school and transition into postsecondary education, vocational training, and integrated employment settings. A substantial body of educational research indicates that high educator expectations operate as a catalyst for student academic achievement, self-determination, and longitudinal postsecondary success. However, historically, students with identified educational disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)<\/a> have frequently encountered lowered educator expectations, deficit-oriented transition paradigms, and limited exposure to rigorous academic curricula.<\/p>\n The CCR-TES addresses a major psychometric gap in educational and transition measurement. Existing instruments in secondary transition typically assess student-reported self-determination, objective transition planning compliance, or standardized academic milestones. What was noticeably absent was a psychometrically sound, standardized inventory explicitly capturing educator attitudes toward the multidimensional competencies necessary for adult readiness. Measuring teacher expectations is of critical practical importance because teachers directly shape individualized education programs (IEPs), course placement decisions, instructional adaptations, work-based learning referrals, and pedagogical rigor. When general or special education teachers hold low postschool expectations, they may unintentionally limit transition opportunities, reinforce learned helplessness, and restrict access to general education curricula.<\/p>\n From an applied perspective, the CCR-TES serves multiple educational, diagnostic, and research functions:<\/p>\n The psychological construct evaluated by the CCR-TES is the educator\u2019s cognitive appraisal of student capability across postsecondary readiness domains<\/em>. In the context of secondary special education and transition science, teacher expectations represent predictive mental representations and evaluative judgments regarding an adolescent\u2019s capacity to acquire, sustain, and generalize the comprehensive cognitive, social, and functional behaviors required in college and vocational environments.<\/p>\n Although the definitive psychometric validation demonstrated that the CCR-TES functions best as an omnibus, unidimensional construct, its operational formulation is grounded in five interconnected developmental domains defined by contemporary CCR models (Lombardi et al., 2018; Morningstar et al., 2017):<\/p>\n This operational domain captures educators\u2019 expectations regarding a student’s cognitive investment, persistence, and functional execution of high school and postsecondary coursework. It encompasses cognitive self-regulation during instructional tasks, homework completion, active participation in class discussions, receptive language processing during lectures, and the capacity to synthesize complex textual and technical information. In the context of teacher expectations, it reflects whether an educator perceives a student with disabilities as capable of handling postsecondary academic rigor and meeting the cognitive demands of credit-bearing collegiate classes or specialized occupational training.<\/p>\n Interpersonal engagement involves the socio-emotional mechanisms necessary to build and maintain professional and academic relationships. Key facets include cooperative collaboration in group settings, respectful interactions with faculty and workplace supervisors, peer negotiation, conflict resolution, and the understanding of implicit social norms. Within the CCR-TES construct, educator expectations of interpersonal engagement gauge the perceived capacity of SWD to function appropriately within social networks in adult environments, advocate for themselves socially, and exhibit professional communication decorum.<\/p>\n Process-oriented skills represent cognitive and metacognitive executive functions, including time management, organization of physical and digital learning materials, prioritization of tasks, long-term project planning, task-switching, and adaptive problem-solving. Educators evaluate whether students with disabilities are expected to independently organize their study environments, manage unstructured collegiate schedules, and systematically navigate workplace challenges without continuous external adult prompting.<\/p>\n Grounded in the constructs of self-determination<\/a> and autonomous motivation, ownership of learning measures an educator’s assessment of a student\u2019s self-efficacy, internal locus of control, educational goal-setting, self-monitoring, and active request for reasonable accommodations. High expectations in this domain indicate an educator\u2019s belief that a student can independently recognize when they require assistance, take initiative to seek out disability service offices or academic tutors, and sustain intrinsic motivation despite academic setbacks.<\/p>\n Transition competencies encompass the applied ecological skills required to bridge secondary environments with postsecondary life. These include career awareness, understanding the differences between secondary entitlement laws (IDEA) and postsecondary civil rights legislation (ADA Section 504<\/a>), functional community navigation, financial literacy, and the practical application of vocational skills in community-based work experiences.<\/p>\n The CCR-TES is anchored in an integration of social-psychological expectancy theory, educational self-determination theory, and contemporary ecological models of college and career readiness.<\/p>\n The conceptual foundation rests firmly upon Teacher Expectancy Theory<\/a>, historically pioneered by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) and refined by Jussim and Harber (2005). This theoretical perspective posits that teacher expectations do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they function as cognitive schemas that directly determine teacher instructional behavior, the emotional climate of the classroom, the frequency of feedback, and the level of intellectual challenge extended to students. When educators hold high expectations for an individual student, they provide more rigorous instructional input, allow longer response latencies, offer higher-level corrective feedback, and provide more extensive opportunities for independent inquiry. Conversely, when low expectations are held\u2014a phenomenon historically documented among educators working with students carrying disability labels\u2014teachers often deliver simplified curricula, limit instructional autonomy, and emphasize basic compliance over critical thinking.<\/p>\n Complementing expectancy theory is Social Cognitive Theory<\/a> (Bandura, 1986) and Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Bandura\u2019s triadic reciprocal determinism underscores that personal cognitive factors (e.g., educator beliefs), environmental factors (e.g., inclusive school structures, IEP goals), and actual behaviors (e.g., student task engagement) mutually reinforce one another. Within the CCR-TES framework, teacher expectations are viewed as a key environmental input that shapes a student\u2019s emerging self-efficacy and agency. Concurrently, Self-Determination Theory emphasizes that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are fundamental psychological needs; when teachers possess expectations that recognize and nurture these needs, students with disabilities are afforded the psychological freedom and developmental scaffolding required to develop autonomous ownership over their transition goals.<\/p>\n Historically, educational accountability under federal legislation concentrated heavily on academic content standards (e.g., reading and mathematics proficiencies). However, comprehensive frameworks pioneered by Morningstar et al. (2017) and expanded by Lombardi et al. (2018, 2020, 2022) established that college and career readiness for diverse learners, specifically students with high- and low-incidence disabilities, requires an expanded, multidimensional framework. These models assert that true postsecondary readiness encompasses a matrix of cognitive strategies, content knowledge, learning skills, and transition knowledge. The CCR-TES translates these ecological frameworks into an operational psychometric architecture, enabling researchers to measure the degree to which teachers endorse readiness expectations across this integrated continuum.<\/p>\n The psychometric validation of the CCR-TES followed an established, multi-stage developmental and analytical sequence to ensure content and construct validity:<\/p>\n The initial content pool for the CCR-TES comprised 54 candidate items generated directly from established CCR theoretical models and empirical transition literature (Morningstar et al., 2017; Lombardi et al., 2018, 2022). To ensure high content validity, the authors convened an expert panel comprising nine nationally recognized researchers specializing in secondary transition, special education, and educational measurement, alongside an active practicing secondary educator serving as a target population representative. The expert panel conducted qualitative and quantitative reviews, evaluating each item for domain representativeness, clarity, relevance to postsecondary success, and absence of deficit-oriented linguistic bias. Based on panel feedback, items exhibiting conceptual overlap, ambiguous phrasing, or weak theoretical alignment were revised, retained, or systematically deleted, establishing strong content validity prior to empirical field testing.<\/p>\n Construct validity was evaluated using a large-scale national sample of secondary educators across the United States, representing both general education and special education disciplines. Construct validation proceeded through consecutive exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) paradigms:<\/p>\n A central psychometric requirement for any cross-disciplinary educational measure is the demonstration of measurement invariance across diverse respondent subgroups. Monahan et al. (2023) evaluated whether the CCR-TES functions equivalently across special education teachers and general education teachers using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. Invariance was tested hierarchically according to the methodological criteria outlined by Cheung and Rensvold (2002):<\/p>\n The reliability of the CCR-TES was rigorously analyzed within a contemporary modern psychometric framework. Rather than relying solely on Cronbach\u2019s coefficient alpha (α)\u2014which has documented limitations when applied to non-tau-equivalent, multidimensional item sets, and can artificially inflate when scales contain more than 20 items\u2014the investigators computed McDonald\u2019s omega (ω) to measure composite internal consistency reliability.<\/p>\n For the final 33-item unidimensional CCR-TES, the latent construct yielded an omega value of:<\/p>\n ω = 0.99<\/span><\/p>\n This internal consistency statistic indicates high true-score variance and minimal measurement error across the 33 items. It confirms that the retained items converge reliably on the underlying dimension of teacher expectations. Such a high reliability coefficient supports the use of the CCR-TES not only for aggregated group-level educational research, but also for institutional diagnostic benchmarking and program evaluation where precise measurement is essential.<\/p>\n The structural development of the CCR-TES utilized advanced latent variable modeling, progressing from exploratory structural identification to confirmatory validation and multi-sample invariance testing.<\/p>\n Initial exploratory factor analysis was executed on the preliminary item draft using oblique rotation techniques (e.g., Promax\/Geomin) to account for anticipated correlations among educational readiness competencies. The initial EFA suggested an empirical five-factor structure reflecting the five theoretical framework components: Academic Engagement, Interpersonal Engagement, Process-Oriented Skills, Ownership of Learning, and Transition Competencies. However, mathematical examination of the factor correlation matrix revealed high inter-factor correlations across all five latent variables, frequently approaching or exceeding .80. These empirical findings indicated substantial shared variance, suggesting that a parsimonious single-factor model would provide a more coherent psychometric representation.<\/p>\n To statistically evaluate whether a multidimensional or unidimensional representation was superior, the investigators tested competing models in a confirmatory framework using robust maximum likelihood estimation procedures:<\/p>\n The table below summarizes the multi-group confirmatory factor analysis results comparing general education teachers and special education teachers:<\/p>\nKeywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
\n
Purpose<\/h2>\n
\n
Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. Academic Engagement<\/h3>\n
2. Interpersonal Engagement<\/h3>\n
3. Process-Oriented Skills<\/h3>\n
4. Ownership of Learning<\/h3>\n
5. Transition Competencies<\/h3>\n
Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Teacher Expectancy Theory and the Pygmalion Paradigm<\/h3>\n
Self-Determination Theory and Social Cognitive Theory<\/h3>\n
Comprehensive College and Career Readiness Frameworks<\/h3>\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
Content Validity<\/h3>\n
Construct Validity<\/h3>\n
\n
Measurement Invariance<\/h3>\n
\n
Reliability<\/h2>\n
Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)<\/h3>\n
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)<\/h3>\n
\n
Measurement Invariance Fit Indices Across Educator Groups<\/h3>\n