Developing a scale to assess post-primary educators’ attitudes with regard to the promotion of student wellbeing

Abstract

Over the last number of years, there has been an increased move towards attending to the social and emotional wellbeing of students in Irish post-primary schools. Several studies have indicated that educators' positive attitudes toward health and wellbeing education are crucial to achieving whole-school implementation in terms of the promotion of student wellbeing. However, as of yet, no test instrument exists that is designed to quantify the attitudes of educators in this regard. This study aimed to develop a test instrument that could be used to assess educators' attitudes with regard to the promotion of student wellbeing in Irish post-primary schools. The study was conducted in three stages: Content validity, involving seven experts and 14 educators; exploratory factor analysis (n = 129), and; confirmatory factor analysis (n = 99). Analyses indicated the viability of a 10-item two-factor model, which was named the 'Attitudes Toward Wellbeing Promotion' (ATWP) scale.

Do educators value the promotion of students’ wellbeing? Quantifying educators’ attitudes toward wellbeing promotion

“…Section one was a demographic questionnaire totalling 10 questions. Section two comprised the ATWP scale [ 17 ], and was aimed at directly addressing research question one. The ATWP scale is a 10 item, Likert response-format test instrument consisting of two non-correlated subscales:…”

“…The ATWP design is informed by the Affective, Behavioural, Cognitive (ABC) model of attitude [ 17 ] (see S1 Appendix for the composition of the ATWP). Each of the 10 items that comprise the ATWP produced item-Content Validity Index (i-CVI) values of 1.0, indicating the highest level of content validity.…”

Teachers' professional wellbeing. A digital game based social-emotional learning intervention

“…The concept of using Literacy or Competence instead of literacies tends to lead to simplified views about a highly complex subject area, resulting in hasty definitions rather than clarifying descriptions of phenomena. Alternative approaches include Brann's perspective on mental health education as self-efficacy and teacher training (Brann et al, 2022) and Byrne's well-being approach (Byrne et al, 2022b(Byrne et al, , 2022a. In these discussions, it's easy to overlook that multiple aspects are involved simultaneously, especially the significance of intentionality and the comprehension of literacies (as depicted in Figure 1).…”

"Educational Anamnesis and Emotional Well-being in Lifelong Learning for Older Adults: Strategies and Assessments for Comprehensive Care"

“…Therefore, we have developed a list of items for this new survey, which will undergo content validity analysis, leading to a second stage which will be an exploratory factor analysis of those items. To assess construct validity, we will rely on a proven methodology [90][91][92]. For this last survey, as was done with the previous ones, approval will be requested from the ethics committee of the International University of La Rioja (Spain).…”

“…(3) Attitudes towards well-being curricula, and (4) Attitudes towards well-being guidelines [90,110] (Table 2).…”