Measuring students’ and teachers’ perceptions of resources in inclusive education – validation of a newly developed instrument

ABSTRACT

Previous research suggests that the perception of available resources has a major influence on teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education (Avramidis, E., and B. Norwich. 2002. “Teacher’s Attitudes Towards Integration/Inclusion: A Review of the Literature.” European Journal of Special Needs Education 17 (2): 129–47; Schwab, S. 2018 (in press). Attitudes Towards Inclusive Schooling. A Study on Students’, Teachers’ and Parents’ Attitudes. Münster: Waxmann). On the side of the students, no similar studies exist that examine the impact of insufficiently perceived resources on inclusive education. To assess the extent to which students – and their teachers – perceive that the resources at their school are adequate or meet their needs, the ‘Perception of Resources Questionnaire’ (PRQ) was developed.

To analyse the psychometric quality (factor structure, reliability, validity) of the instrument, data were collected from 42 inclusive classes (n = 701 students, n = 27 teachers) of lower secondary level in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The main component analysis showed a single factor structure. The reliability of the scale (cronbach's alpha .67) can nevertheless be considered acceptable, since it is a short scale which comprises heterogeneous items in terms of content. For the purpose of validation, multilevel regression analyses were conducted. The findings show that only the teachers’ perception of resources – and not the resources actually available – is a significant predictor for students’ perception. Finally, the findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Resources
• resource perception
• inclusive education
• students’ perspective
• teachers’ perspective
• students with special educational needs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Janka Goldan Since 10/2017 Research associate at the School of Education, Bergische University Wuppertal. Since 09/2015 Research associate at the WIB, Bergische University Wuppertal. 2013 to 2016 Part-time studies of Business Administration at the University of Hagen, Degree: Business Administration (IWW). 2012 to 2015 Project manager in a marketing agency, Frankfurt am Main. 2006 to 2012 Studies of Education, Psychology and Sociology at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Institute of Education, University College London, UK.

Susanne Schwab Since 2017 Extraordinary Professor in the Research Focus Area Optentia at the North-West University in Vanderbijlpark (South Africa). Since 2016 Full Professor at the School of Education, University of Wuppertal, Germany. 2015 Venia Legendi (habilitation; dealing with inclusive education) from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. 2014 to 2015 Interim professor at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. 2013 to 2014 Assistant Professor at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria. 2009 to 2012 PhD from the Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria. 2004 to 2010 Studies of Psychology, Education and Gender Studies at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria.

Notes

1 Hardly any secondary school system (grades 5 to 10) is as highly differentiated as that in North Rhine-Westphalia. Until a few years ago, the three-tier school system consisted primarily of the following types of secondary schools: Gymnasium (high school equivalence – awards highest school leaving certificate upon graduation), Realschule (middle school leaving certificate is awarded at graduation) and Hauptschule (lowest school leaving certificate is awarded at graduation). In the last decades, further types of schools have emerged as a result of political developments and some model experiments. Gesamtschulen (comprehensive schools) are schools of longer joint learning (all school qualifications can be obtained here). Gemeinschaftsschulen (like community schools) and Sekundarschulen (like secondary schools) are quite similar to comprehensive schools, but some of them teach inter-year and full-time (all school-leaving certificates can be obtained in all the three types of schools).

2 We also checked for the item 4 in the teachers’ sample and similar to the students’ sample, the psychometric quality for this item was very low.

3 In the teacher sample, the reliability of the scale was similar (α = .69).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the School of Education, Bergische University Wuppertal.