Cross-Cultural Comparisons of School Leadership using Rasch Measurement

School leadership influences school conditions and organizational climate; these conditions in turn impact student outcomes. Accordingly, examining differences in principals' perceptions of leadership activities within and across countries may provide insight into achievement differences. The major purpose of this study was to explore differences in the relative difficulty of principals' leadership activities across four countries that reflect Asian and North American national contexts: (1) Hong Kong SAR, (2) Chinese Taipei, (3) the United States, and (4) Canada. We also sought to illustrate the use of Rasch measurement theory as a modern measurement approach to exploring the psychometric properties of a leadership survey, with a focus on differential item functioning. We applied a rating scale formulation of the Many-facet Rasch model to principals' responses to the Leadership Activities Scale in order to examine the degree to which the overall ordering of leadership activities was invariant across the four countries. Overall, the results suggested that there were significant differences in the difficulty ordering of leadership activities across countries, and that these differences were most pronounced between the two continents. Implications are discussed for research and practice.