The Development and Validation of a Teacher Efficacy for Inclusion Scale
Item
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Title
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The Development and Validation of a Teacher Efficacy for Inclusion Scale
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:14c030607d00:10741
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identifier
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10959
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Creator
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Hollender, Ian,
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Contributor
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Barry Zimmerman
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Educational psychology | Special education | Educational evaluation | inclusion | self efficacy | teacher efficacy
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Abstract
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Since the 1970's there has been a movement in the United States aimed at increasing the integration of students with disabilities among non-disabled peers in general education classes. The practice of inclusion---full integration of students regardless of the severity of disability---is not uniformly accepted. While many agree with the ideals and intent behind the practice, there is an almost unanimous belief among teachers that they are not sufficiently prepared to instruct and manage students in inclusion classes. There is research indicating that inclusion classes require additional instructional and managerial competencies of teachers' as well as their efficacy beliefs about those competencies. Despite the success of general teacher efficacy measures in assessing important areas of teacher functioning in regular classrooms, their role in inclusion classes have been left unaddressed to date.;In the current study, I developed a new teacher efficacy scale---Teacher Efficacy for Inclusion (TEI). The items that comprised this scale were evaluated and modified initially for their face validity by an expert panel of inclusion teachers. The resulting teacher efficacy scale displayed a high level of alpha reliability (.94). Items that showed lower correlations with other items were deleted from the scale. In terms of the factorial structure of the TEI, an exploratory principal components analysis revealed the unitary factor structure of the instrument.;The construct validity of the scale was demonstrated by its high correlation (r = .83) with a general measure of teacher efficacy. In terms of the concurrent validity of the TEI, there was significant evidence indicating that this scale predicted the On-Task Behavior of students with educational disabilities. The TEI also predicted teachers' requests for Emergency Support. These two effects of teacher efficacy for inclusion were demonstrated using regression analyses that controlled for the following background variables: Teacher Experience, gender, class size, and level of Push-In Support. These results suggest that the TEI has the potential for reliably and validly measuring teacher's feelings of competence in inclusion classes, and being used to provide teachers with feedback to improve the quality of their instructional practices.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Educational Psychology
