Today’s schools are becoming increasingly diverse with regard to culture, language, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status. Consequently, schools are challenged with providing an effective learning environment for every student in response to an increasingly diverse and multicultural student population. Culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2000), or culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) are some of the terms or concepts that appear in the education literature to emphasize collective empowerment and social justice (Aronson and Laughter, 2016) fostering and promoting educational equity and excellence in schools through cultural diversity.

Gay (2000), p. 29, defined culturally responsive teaching as “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant and effective for them.” She further notes that “being culturally responsive is more than being respectful, empathetic, or sensitive” (p. 3).

According to Gay (2013), successful implementation of culturally responsive teaching requires: eradicating the deficit view of students and communities; expecting, understanding, and resisting the opposition to culturally responsive teaching; teachers’ understanding how and why culture and difference are essential ideologies and foundations; and establishing pedagogical connections between culturally responsive teaching and specific subjects and skills taught in schools. The ability of principals and teachers to engage in cultural responsiveness requires that they have a certain degree of cultural competence themselves as well (Castagno and Brayboy, 2008).

Like New Zealand, many Western educational systems continue to result in poorer learning outcomes for indigenous, minority, or vulnerable students. However, there are countries such as Japan and some Nordic countries that have more equitable learning outcomes than others (Pickett and Wilkinson, 2009), which indicate that it is achievable.

Schools need to provide high-quality teaching for heterogeneous groups of students (Alton-Lee, 2003). There is an increasing recognition of the importance of cultural responsiveness and its influence on student outcomes.

Although the Ministry of Education is continuing to build a culturally responsive education system where all children can progress and achieve to their very best, Māori and non-Māori disparity in learning outcomes persists [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2010, 2013); Cavanagh et al., 2012; Educational Assessment Research Unit and New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 2013a,b, 2014a,b, 2015a,b]. In this regard, a closer examination of New Zealand schools’ culturally responsive practices is vital to address this achievement disparity and Māori people’s concerns about current pedagogic practices in mainstream schools.

As part of gaining an understanding of schools’ cultural responsiveness and its association with the achievement of priority learner groups, the NMSSA: Wānangatia Te Putanga Tauira developed a new self-report inventory, the Culturally Responsive Practices for Māori Scale (CRPMS), drawing on the educultural wheel (Macfarlane, 2004).

National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement is a collaboration between the Educational Assessment Research Unit at the University of Otago, the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, and the Ministry of Education. This program has been operating since 2012 with a 5-year cycle. NMSSA is sample based monitoring project designed to assess and understand student achievement at year 4 and year 8 in New Zealand primary schools.

A nationally representative sample of approximately 5,000 students in 200 schools are randomly selected across year 4 and year 8 each year to take part in NMSSA. Assessments are administered by experienced and trained teacher assessors. NMSSA uses complementary forms of assessments: group administered paper and pencil or computer-based assessments and in-depth interviews and performance assessments.

To help understand factors that are related to student achievement, contextual information is collected via student, teacher, and principal questionnaires. Approximately 600 teachers and 200 principals from participating schools are invited to respond to teacher and principal questionnaires, respectively. NMSSA has a responsibility to focus on three priority learner groups: Māori students, Pasifika students, and students with special education needs (Allan, 2012).

Most of the New Zealand research related to cultural responsiveness is qualitative in nature and uses checklists and case studies [e.g., Education Review Office (ERO)’s school evaluation indicators]. No psychometric instrument has been developed to specifically assess cultural responsiveness of schools at a national level. Therefore, a new self-report inventory, CRPMS, was developed as part of the NMSSA project.

A review of the related research literature revealed that only a few instruments have been developed specifically to measure cultural responsiveness, including Siwatu’s (Siwatu, 2007) Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Efficacy and Culturally Responsive Teaching Outcome Expectancy scales. However, these measures and most of the others elicit information from teachers regarding their beliefs or expectations rather than their practices.

The purpose of the study reported in this paper is to present the development and analysis of the factorial structure and psychometric properties of the CRPMS designed to measure and understand schools’ cultural responsiveness practices in relation to Māori.

The theoretical framework for the development of CRPMS was grounded within the educultural wheel proposed by Macfarlane (2004) and guided by Ka Hikitia—Accelerating Success 2013–2017 (Ministry of Education, 2013).

Macfarlane’s (2004) educultural wheel framework was designed to support the development of positive interactions between teachers and Māori students. It consists of five interrelated concepts (or factors) that encompass key aspects of culturally responsive educational settings. These concepts include: Whanaungatanga (building relationships), Manaakitanga (ethic of caring), Rangatiratanga (teacher effectiveness), Kotahitanga (ethic of bonding), and Pumanawatanga (school morale, tone, pulse). Bishop et al. (2007) are consistent with Macfarlane’s (2004) model in identifying Manaakitanga and Kotahitanga for improving learning outcomes for Māori learners. According to Macfarlane (2004), p.64, “these concepts do not exist in isolation from each other—more often than not, they coexist or are amalgamated. Since Māori insist on wholeness, this is quite natural.”

According to Macfarlane (2004), whanaungatanga is about building relationships with students, parents, and the community. It refers to the extent to which the school generates opportunities to build mutual respect within their school community. Manaakitanga is the extent to which the school demonstrates a “duty of care” based on kindness and respect. It is not optional but obligatory. Rangatiratanga is about developing teachers’ skills and knowledge in order to develop the mana (integrity and dignity) of Māori students. Kotahitanga refers to the extent to which the school has developed practices and approaches to build a sense of unity and inclusiveness that support a culturally safe environment. Pumanawatanga is in the center of the model and represents whether the school has developed an infrastructure of care and support for students and teachers that is consistent with other four concepts.

Ka Hikitia–Accelerating Success 2013–2017 (Ministry of Education, 2013, p. 9) is the government’s strategy “to rapidly change how education performs so that all Māori students gain the skills, qualifications, and knowledge they need to succeed and to be proud in knowing who they are as Māori.” Ka Hikitia provides an educational framework, which guides all educational stakeholders to enable Māori students reach their full potential.

This study aimed to address a gap in current research on cultural responsiveness by introducing the CRPMS, a self-report instrument designed to measure schools’ culturally responsive practices in relation to Māori students. A practical contribution of this study is to develop a useful analytical tool to inform educators and researchers on whether schools are effectively responding to the specific learning and cultural needs of Māori learners. Such information will be invaluable for education stakeholders and will also be able to contribute to the current debate on whether Māori students achieve better in schools that are more culturally responsive.

The process of item generation began by reviewing the literature and empirical studies that discussed models and indicators of cultural responsiveness. To generate the initial set of items for the CRPMS, the NMSSA team worked with three local principals and discussed the nature of cultural responsiveness and current practices at their schools. At this meeting, a total of 34 Likert-type items were crafted under the five concepts. It is important to note here that all the items are about schools’ practices rather than principals’ beliefs.

Following this, the team took this draft to the NMSSA Māori reference group, which is a group of about 10 Māori educationalists from New Zealand including teachers, principals, ministry officials, advisors, and academic researchers who are leading figures in Māori education. The reference group members discussed and re-shaped the items within each concept quite substantially to ensure that the concepts and items validly represented the construct of culturally responsive practices for Māori students. To ensure that the items would be understood by the potential respondents (principals), the revised version was reviewed once again by the Māori reference group and Ministry of Education officials. Then the revised version was piloted with principals from a range of schools. At the end of this process, 27 items were retained for the final version and were measured on a 4-point scale with response options of 1 = not at all like our school, 2 = a little like our school, 3 = moderately like our school, and 4 = very like our school. These 27 items were hypothesized to load on the above-mentioned five factors: Whanaungatanga, Manaakitanga, Rangatiratanga, Kotahitanga, and Pumanawatanga. The items in the CRPMS are shown in Table A1 in Appendix.

The proportion of overall missing data was 2.04 percent. Little’s MCAR test results for each factor suggested that the data were missing completely at random (p > 0.05), which supported the use of EM imputation. The descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1. The mean scores for all items ranged from 2.40 to 3.84, suggesting that most principals indicated that the statements, on average, were “moderately like our school.” The SDs ranged from 0.40 to 1.15. The lowest mean score was observed for the Rangatiratanga statements (teacher effectiveness) whereas the highest mean score was for the Whanaungatanga statements (building relationships). Examination of the means for each concept indicated that schools had different perceptions of their culturally responsive practices. For example, the mean of teacher effectiveness concept ranged from 1 (not at all like our school) to 4 (very like our school).

MPlus 7 (Muthén and Muthén, 2012) was used for the CFA of each measurement model and the relationships between latent factors. The goodness-of-fit criteria of alternative models were examined. Table 2 presents the results of the model comparisons.

The CFI, TLI, and WRMR values for model 1 and model 2 did not meet the acceptable fit criteria. Among alternative models tested, a measurement model consistent with Macfarlane’s framework (model 3) provided adequate fit within the recommended values of goodness-of-fit criteria and was retained as the model of best fit. For this model, factor correlations are given in Table 3.

The correlations between CRPMS factors ranged from 0.52 to 0.90 indicating that the evidence for discriminant validity was not strong. However, the level of relationship amongst factors was consistent with Macfarlane’s theory of “wholeness” appropriate for Māori cultural responsiveness. The highest correlations were found between Kotahitanga and Pumanawatanga, and Kotahitanga and Manaakitanga.

The unstandardized and standardized factor loadings and factor reliabilities are presented in Table 4. The limitations and problems of coefficient alpha (Cronbach, 1951) as a measure of reliability estimate is well established in the literature (Sijtsma, 2009; Teo and Fan, 2013), but this index is still widely used. Therefore, the greatest lower bound (glb) to reliability (Jackson and Agunwamba, 1977; Woodhouse and Jackson, 1977) was calculated and reported as a better estimate of reliability (Ten Berge and Sočan, 2004; Sijtsma, 2009). Greatest lower bound estimates were computed by means of the FACTOR program (Lorenzo-Seva and Ferrando, 2006), which can be downloaded from http://psico.fcep.urv.es/utilitats/factor/Download.html. Sijtsma (2009), however, states that alpha should also be used alongside glb as a better practice for reporting reliability (p. 118). This is the procedure followed in this study.

All item parameter estimates were statistically significant at p < 0.001 level. Factor loadings ranged from 0.35 to 0.86, which provided support for convergent validity evidence. Two of the coefficient alpha reliability estimates were slightly less than the recommended level (0.70) for instrument development. Given the small number of items for those factors; however, these values were considered acceptable. On the other hand, all glb estimates were greater than the 0.70 threshold. The CFA analyses, factor correlations, and reliabilities provided support for the factorial and construct validity evidence of the CRPMS.