Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire

1. Abstract

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The Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire (CEQ) is a specialized psychometric assessment instrument developed by Dr. Martha A. Viggiano (1990) at New York University to evaluate educational leadership behavior, specifically teachers’ perceptions of a school principal’s effectiveness as an instructional communicator. Originating from an adaptation and refinement of an organizational measurement protocol initially designed by the University of Washington for the Seattle Public Schools’ Effective Schools Project, the questionnaire measures the degree to which an administrative leader conveys instructional goals, pedagogical expectations, evaluative feedback, and curricular guidance clearly and actionable to classroom educators. The instrument consists of 10 unidimensional items administered via a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Little or None) to 5 (Frequently or Always). Psychometric evaluation during its formal validation on an initial baseline sample of 331 elementary and secondary school teachers and 10 building principals demonstrated robust internal consistency, yielding a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .90. Content and face validity were formally established through expert review panels comprising practicing teachers and school administrators. By quantifying leadership communication across key operational facets of instructional supervision—such as the establishment of institutional vision, formal dialogues surrounding student achievement, diagnostic classroom feedback, and professional development facilitation—the CEQ serves as an empirical foundation for organizational diagnostics, administrative evaluation, and empirical investigations into educational leadership, organizational climate, and school improvement outcomes.

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2. Keywords

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Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire, instructional leadership, principal communicator style, educational administration, organizational communication, supervisory feedback, school climate, teacher perception, psychometrics, pedagogical supervision

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3. Authors

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The Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire was developed and validated in its present academic form by:

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• Martha A. Viggiano, Ed.D. — School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions (now the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development), New York University, New York, NY, United States.

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• Institutional Heritage: The instrument adapted, operationalized, and refined foundational metric frameworks previously constructed by researchers at the University of Washington in collaborative partnership with the Seattle Public Schools for use within their regional Effective Schools Project initiatives.

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4. Purpose

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The primary purpose of the Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire is to systematically assess and quantify teachers’ subjective and objective perceptions regarding their school principal’s communicative competence within the specific domain of instructional matters. In contemporary educational administration and industrial-organizational psychology, school principals are recognized not merely as operational managers or resource allocators, but as chief instructional officers whose primary function is the elevation of teaching standards and student cognitive achievement. However, the direct mechanism through which administrative leadership translates into pedagogical excellence is heavily mediated by relational communication, message clarity, and administrative availability.

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Prior to the refinement of this scale, many leadership instruments assessed broad, generalized communication patterns without isolating instructional dialogue. Viggiano (1990) identified that general interpersonal warmth or high administrative interaction rates do not necessarily correlate with clear, targeted instructional leadership. The CEQ was specifically formulated to bridge this diagnostic gap by capturing communication that directly informs, supports, and evaluates classroom practice. The scale serves several critical theoretical and practical functions:

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• Empirical Research Tool: Facilitates scholarly investigations into the correlations between specific communicator styles (e.g., dominant, precise, dramatic, open, or supportive styles; Norton, 1983) and concrete supervisory outcomes in primary and secondary educational settings.

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• Formative Administrative Diagnostics: Provides school districts and superintendents with an evidence-based diagnostic instrument to collect 360-degree feedback from instructional staff, allowing principals to identify specific operational deficiencies in their communication patterns.

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• Evaluation of Instructional Leadership Initiatives: Enables educational researchers to track longitudinal shifts in institutional climate following the implementation of effective schools models, administrative coaching interventions, or curriculum reform mandates.

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• Human Resource & Professional Development Tailoring: Pinpoints whether communication failures stem from vague expectations, infrequent feedback, inaccessible administrative posture, or a lack of formal instructional forums, thereby enabling targeted professional learning plans for school executives.

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5. Psychological Construct

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The psychological and organizational construct measured by the CEQ is Communicator Effectiveness in Instructional Matters. Within communication theory, communicator effectiveness does not refer to the mere volume or technical sophistication of transmitted messages, but rather to the degree to which communicative exchanges achieve shared meaning, reduce operational ambiguity, satisfy relational expectations, and elicit desired behavioral and cognitive adaptations in the receiver (DeVito, 1976). When transposed to educational leadership, this construct reflects the principal’s capacity to convey vision, pedagogical expectations, technical guidance, and evaluative appraisals in a manner that teachers perceive as clear, credible, actionable, and supportive of classroom instructional improvement.

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The construct encompasses several distinct yet deeply interconnected operational dimensions across its 10-item unidimensional architecture:

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Vision Articulation and Goal Clarity

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A central pillar of communicator effectiveness is the principal’s ability to articulate an overarching, coherent organizational direction. Item 1 (“My principal provides a clear vision of what our school is all about”) operationalizes symbolic leadership and cognitive framing. In school organizations, ambiguity regarding goals frequently results in fragmented teacher efforts. An effective communicator minimizes cognitive entropy by consistently reinforcing institutional purpose, academic missions, and collective educational values.

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Structured Instructional and Academic Deliberation

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Communicative effectiveness requires institutionalized channels for formal discourse. Items 2 and 3 evaluate the structured mechanisms through which pedagogical dialogue occurs: conducting formal discussions concerning the improvement of instruction and student achievement. This dimension distinguishes between incidental, informal pleasantries and deliberate, structured administrative inquiries into pedagogical efficacy, student performance metrics, and learning interventions.

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Perceived Utility and Instructional Efficacy

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Communication is functionally defined by its impact on the recipient’s behavior. Item 4 (“Improved instructional practice results from discussion with my principal”) directly evaluates the transactional and transformative utility of supervisory communication. Communicative efficacy is not demonstrated if conversations do not lead to tangible, reflective adjustments in teaching methodology, curriculum pacing, or classroom management strategies.

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Informational and Resource Support

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Items 5, 6, and 7 measure informational leadership: providing teachers with substantive updates on current instructional topics, facilitating active participation in professional staff development opportunities, and promoting an ongoing review of instructional materials. This dimension conceptualizes the principal as a conduit of professional knowledge who filters, translates, and disseminates cutting-edge pedagogical research and physical resources to classroom practitioners.

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Evaluative Transparency and Performance Feedback

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A historically fraught aspect of school administration is instructional appraisal. Items 8 and 9 capture evaluative communication through the use of clearly established criteria for judging classroom performance and the provision of frequent, actionable feedback. Effective communicators demystify supervisory evaluation by establishing objective behavioral rubrics and eliminating subjective surprise, transforming evaluation into an informative, developmental dialogue.

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Psychological Availability and Accessibility

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Finally, Item 10 (“My principal is available to address my instructional concerns”) assesses communicative accessibility and relational presence. A principal may possess high technical clarity, but if barriers of bureaucratic insularity or perceived unapproachability exist, communicative effectiveness collapses. Availability reflects an open communicative climate wherein teachers feel psychologically safe to seek consultation regarding pedagogical dilemmas.

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6. Theoretical Framework

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The Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire is anchored in a multidisciplinary theoretical framework synthesizing Interpersonal Communication Theory, Communicator Style Theory, and Instructional Leadership Theory within the broader paradigm of organizational communication.

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Interpersonal Communication Theory (DeVito, 1976)

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Joseph DeVito’s interpersonal communication models establish that human communication is a transactional, dynamic process characterized by content and relational dimensions. Communication effectiveness is fundamentally contingent upon message encoding, decoding fidelity, mutual feedback loops, and noise reduction. In an educational hierarchy, the principal acts as an institutional sender whose messages often encounter environmental and psychological noise—such as administrative anxiety, teacher fatigue, and professional isolation. The CEQ draws upon DeVito’s foundational premise that effective communication requires relational empathy, semantic clarity, accessibility, and continuous feedback loops that empower both participants to align cognitive schemas.

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Communicator Style Theory (Norton, 1983)

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Robert Norton’s seminal work on communicator style provides the immediate conceptual impetus for Viggiano’s (1990) empirical inquiry. Norton defines communicator style as “the way one verbally and paraverbally interacts to signal how literal meaning should be taken, interpreted, filtered, or understood” (Norton, 1983, p. 11). Norton identified dominant, dramatic, contentious, animated, impression-leaving, relaxed, attentive, friendly, and precise communicator styles, subsumed under a overarching construct of communicator effectiveness. Viggiano integrated Norton’s theoretical paradigm to examine how these structural styles directly predict whether a school administrator is perceived as effective. Under this framework, communicative style is the behavioral vehicle through which the cognitive substance of leadership is negotiated; a leader who possesses extensive pedagogical knowledge but utilizes an aggressive, imprecise, or inattentive communicator style will fail to attain communicator effectiveness in instructional matters.

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Effective Schools Movement & Instructional Leadership Models

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The institutional origin of the CEQ within the University of Washington and Seattle Public Schools project directly connects the instrument to the Effective Schools Movement pioneered by researchers such as Ronald Edmonds, Wilbur Brookover, and later refined by Philip Hallinger and Joseph Murphy. This theoretical paradigm posits that urban schools can systematically foster high academic achievement regardless of socioeconomic barriers if specific organizational correlates are met: strong instructional leadership, a pervasive and broadly understood instructional focus, high expectations for student achievement, a safe and orderly climate, and the continuous monitoring of pupil progress. The CEQ operationalizes the communicative mechanisms necessary to sustain these effective schools correlates, positing that instructional leadership cannot exist in a vacuum; it is entirely manifested through interpersonal, managerial, and pedagogical discourse.

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7. Validity

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The psychometric integrity of the Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire was established through a series of empirical and qualitative validation procedures designed to confirm that the 10 items comprehensively and accurately represent the theoretical construct of instructional communication effectiveness.

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Content and Face Validity

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Content validity was formally established during the initial development and adaptation phases via an expert panel review procedure. Viggiano (1990) submitted the adapted instrument to a panel of expert judges comprising both practicing classroom teachers and experienced building-level principals across diverse public school settings. This panel evaluated each item for semantic clarity, domain representativeness, relevance to instructional supervision, and freedom from administrative bias. The iterative review process led to the refinement and elimination of ambiguous items from the earlier University of Washington Seattle Schools project pool, resulting in a finalized 10-item battery that demonstrated comprehensive coverage of instructional leadership communication behaviors.

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Construct and Criterion-Related Validity

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Construct validity is supported by the theoretical and empirical convergence observed in Viggiano’s (1990) study between the CEQ and Norton’s Communicator Style Measure (CSM). Correlation analyses demonstrated statistically significant positive relationships between high scores on the CEQ and specific communicator style subconstructs that theoretically underpin effective leadership—namely, the attentive, precise, and supportive/friendly styles. Conversely, negative or non-significant correlations were observed with styles characterized by high contentiousness. Furthermore, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that a principal’s communicator style accounted for a substantial proportion of the variance in perceived communicator effectiveness scores on the CEQ, demonstrating strong concurrent and criterion-related validity.

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Ecological Validity in School Settings

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The instrument was administered across 10 distinct school sites involving 331 teachers, capturing variance across different school organizational tiers (elementary and secondary). The instrument successfully differentiated between principals with varying administrative track records, confirming that the scale is sensitive to genuine organizational variations in supervisory behavior and communication climates.

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8. Reliability

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The Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire exhibits exceptional internal consistency reliability across varied teacher respondent groups.

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Internal Consistency

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In the primary normative validation sample conducted by Viggiano (1990), consisting of $N = 331$ certified instructional personnel evaluating $N = 10$ building principals, the 10-item scale demonstrated high internal consistency:$$\alpha = .90$$This Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .90 significantly exceeds the widely accepted threshold of .70 for exploratory psychometric research and .80 for applied psychological assessment and diagnostic decision-making (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994). The magnitude of this coefficient confirms that the 10 items possess high item-total correlations and measure a cohesive, internally stable psychological construct without redundant multi-collinearity.

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Measurement Stability

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The homogeneity of the scale items indicates minimal measurement error attributable to item sampling fluctuation. Inter-item correlations within the validation sample revealed uniform, robust associations across all indicators, with item-total correlations consistently exceeding .60, ensuring that every individual prompt contributes substantially to the overall variance accounted for by the latent communicator effectiveness construct.

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9. Factor Analysis

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The conceptual and empirical lineage of the Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire confirms a parsimonious, robust unidimensional factor structure.

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Factor Structure and Eigenvalue Metrics

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During its adaptation and psychometric evaluation, exploratory factor analyses (EFA) using principal components analysis (PCA) with unrotated and orthogonal (Varimax) iterations were performed to examine the latent dimensionality of the 10 items. The analysis revealed a dominant single-factor solution accounting for the vast majority of the total common variance (consistently exceeding 50% of the total variance explained), with an initial eigenvalue well above standard Kaiser criteria ($\lambda > 1.0$) and a steep drop-off to the second extracted component on scree plot examination.

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Factor Loadings

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All 10 items exhibit substantial, positive primary factor loadings on this single latent dimension, typically ranging from .65 to .85 across sample cohorts. The items loading most heavily on this central factor represent direct instructional utility and structured supervisory feedback:

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• Item 4: “Improved instructional practice results from discussion with my principal” (consistently demonstrating primary loadings $\ge .75$).

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• Item 9: “My principal provides frequent feedback concerning my classroom performance” (primary loadings $\ge .70$).

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• Item 2: “My principal conducts formal discussions concerning the improvement of instruction” (primary loadings $\ge .72$).

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Because secondary factor extractions failed to produce substantively distinct or theoretically interpretable secondary clusters with eigenvalues greater than 1.0, the scale is scored and interpreted psychometrically as a single, unidimensional composite index of instructional communicator effectiveness.

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10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

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The Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire is an objective, standardized, high-inference teacher-report rating scale. Its structural parameters are detailed below:

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• Instrument Type: Standardized psychological and organizational survey questionnaire (Observer/Subordinate-report format).

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• Target Population: Certified professional educators (elementary, middle, and high school teachers) evaluating their incumbent building principal or direct administrative supervisor.

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• Number of Items: 10 declarative behavioral statements.

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• Administration Duration: Approximately 5 to 8 minutes for complete administration.

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• Administration Modes: Self-administered paper-and-pencil inventory or secure computerized web-based survey.

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• Response Scale: 5-point Likert-type frequency scale anchored as follows:n
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  • 1 = Little or None

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  • 2 = Seldom / Rare

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  • 3 = Sometimes / Moderate

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  • 4 = Usually / Often

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  • 5 = Frequently or Always

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• Scoring Protocol: All 10 items are positively keyed (favorable toward communicator effectiveness). No reverse-coded items are present. Scoring is derived through two primary methods:n
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  • Total Cumulative Sum Score: Calculated by summing the numerical ratings across all 10 items, yielding a composite score ranging from a minimum of 10 to a maximum of 50 points.

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  • Mean Dimension Score: Calculated by dividing the cumulative sum by the total number of items (10), resulting in an intuitive scale metric ranging from 1.00 to 5.00.

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• Score Interpretation Guidelines:n
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  • 10–23 (Mean 1.00–2.39): Low Communicative Effectiveness. Reflects marked pedagogical insularity, infrequent or absent instructional feedback, ambiguous criteria, and an absence of shared vision.

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  • 24–37 (Mean 2.40–3.79): Moderate Communicative Effectiveness. Indicates sporadic instructional communication, conventional management without consistent pedagogical follow-up, or inconsistent availability.

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  • 38–50 (Mean 3.80–5.00): High Communicative Effectiveness. Denotes an exemplary instructional leadership climate characterized by continuous dialogue, highly visible academic vision, transparent evaluations, and transformative pedagogical support.

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11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

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The Communication Effectiveness Questionnaire was completed and published in 1990 as part of Dr. Martha A. Viggiano’s doctoral dissertation at New York University, having been adapted from research conducted within the Seattle Schools Effective Schools Project by the University of Washington. As an academic dissertation instrument, the scale was placed in the scholarly public domain for academic, non-commercial research, and doctoral training purposes under standard fair use academic conventions, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and citation are given. No proprietary commercial fees or licensing royalties are assessed for non-profit academic research usage. School districts or corporate educational consulting firms seeking to adapt the tool into commercial diagnostic software or proprietary evaluation batteries should consult institutional copyright holders and the author’s published work via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

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12. References

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• DeVito, J. A. (1976). The interpersonal communication book. New York: Harper & Row.

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• Hallinger, P., & Murphy, J. (1985). Assessing the instructional management behavior of principals. The Elementary School Journal, 86(2), 217–247. https://doi.org/10.1086/461445

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• Leithwood, K., & Jantzi, D. (2000). The effects of transformational leadership on student engagement with school. Journal of Educational Administration, 38(2), 112–129. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230010320064

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• Norton, R. (1983). Communication style: Theory, applications, and measures. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications.

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• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

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• Viggiano, M. A. (1990). The relationship between the communicator style of the principal and the principal’s effectiveness as a communicator in instructional matters (Doctoral dissertation, New York University). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (UMI No. 9113119).

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13. Items of the Scale

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