Rasch Analysis of the Japanese Version of Teacher Efficacy for Inclusive Practices Scale: Scale Unidimensionality.

Ghaleb H Alnahdi,Akie Yada

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01725

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the construct validity of the Japanese version of the Teacher Efficacy for Inclusive Practices (TEIP) scale. The sample consisted of 250 teachers in Japan. Rasch analysis was used to examine the psychometric properties of the scale. Results did not support the 18-item Japanese version of the TEIP scale as a unidimensional scale for measuring TEIP. However, they do support the final 14-item Japanese version of the TEIP scale as a unidimensional scale for measuring TEIP. Four items were removed from the original 18-item scale (items 12, 8, 5, and 3) for violation of the local independency assumption. No item with differential item functioning (DIF) was detected. Only one item (item 18) was rescored to solve a threshold disorder. Further studies with different samples are warranted to confirm the study findings.

Highlights

The past 30 years have seen increasingly rapid advances toward inclusive education in educational policies and systems reinforced by international policy documents (e.g., UNESCO, 1994; United Nations, 2006; United Nations General Assembly, 2015)
Surveys conducted on Japanese regular classroom teachers by Ueno and Nakamura (2011) have shown that the teachers expressed anxiety and difficulty about including children with disabilities under the current support system, even though they agreed on the concept of inclusion
Due to the assumption that in a unidimensional scale, item residuals would not show high correlation after extracting the latent variable, we considered all items with residual correlation of 0.20 above the average as an indicated violation of the local dependency assumption (Hissbach et al, 2011; Makransky and Bilenberg, 2014; Christensen et al, 2017; Lundgren-Nilsson et al, 2019)

Summary

Introduction

The past 30 years have seen increasingly rapid advances toward inclusive education in educational policies and systems reinforced by international policy documents (e.g., UNESCO, 1994; United Nations, 2006; United Nations General Assembly, 2015). Inclusive education can broadly be defined as including all children in mainstream classrooms regardless of their gender, their being from ethnic or linguistic minorities, or having disabilities (UNESCO, 2009). Because of rapid political change toward inclusive education, Japanese teachers’ readiness to implement inclusive education has been questioned by several researchers. Surveys conducted on Japanese regular classroom teachers by Ueno and Nakamura (2011) have shown that the teachers expressed anxiety and difficulty about including children with disabilities under the current support system, even though they agreed on the concept of inclusion. Fujii (2014) studied the teachers’ awareness of keywords related to inclusive education (e.g., “reasonable accommodation” and “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”) and suggested that the teachers’ knowledge level regarding inclusive education is relatively low and they need more in-service training

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Conclusion