The Sentiments, Attitudes, and Concerns about Inclusive Education Revised (SACIE-R) Scale for Measuring Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions about Inclusion

Abstract

This paper reports the final development of a scale to measure pre-service teachers’ perceptions in three constructs of inclusive education, namely, sentiments or comfort levels when engaging with people with disabilities; acceptance of learners with different needs; and concerns about implementing inclusion. The Sentiments, Attitudes, and Concerns about Inclusive Education Revised (SACIE-R) scale was developed from an initial 60 items and administered through a series of refined surveys. A final 15-item scale was validated using 542 pre-service teachers from nine institutions in four countries including Hong Kong, Canada, India, and the United States. It is posited that the SACIE-R scale will yield valuable information for assisting universities and colleges in preparing more specific training to address the needs of pre-service teachers for working with diverse student populations.

Teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education: a critical review of published questionnaires

“…Characteristics of the nine questionnaires that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria are displayed in Table 2. The majority of these questionnaires were developed and administered within English speaking countries (N = 8), although some of these were used in Hong Kong, Singapore and India (for example, Forlin, Earle, Loreman, & Sharma, 2011;Sharma & Desai, 2002). One questionnaire was developed and administered in Dutch, although was translated to English for publication (de Boer, Timmerman, Pijl, & Minnaert, 2012).…”

“…Although questionnaires that were specifically targeted at teachers of preschool, secondary school or higher education were excluded from the review, some of the included papers presented questionnaires that were suitable for use across a range of ages. Three were administered to primary (or elementary) school teachers only (de Boer et al, 2012;Monsen, Ewing, & Boyle, 2015;Sharma & Desai, 2002), six were administered to both primary and secondary school teachers (Antonak & Larrivee, 1995;Bailey, 2004;Forlin et al, 2011;Hastings & Oakford, 2003;Mahat, 2008;Wilczenski, 1995), and two of these were additionally administered to preschool teachers (Bailey, 2004;Forlin et al, 2011). Two of the questionnaires were administered to pre-service teachers (Forlin et al, 2011;Hastings & Oakford, 2003), while the remainder were administered to practicing teachers.…”

Values and beliefs as predictors of pre‐service teachers’ enjoyment of teaching in inclusive settings

“…Final translation was achieved through mutual consent of both translators. In contrast to other studies, we did not reverse code the scales of sentiments and concerns, as negative connections of these scales seemed to be more coherent (Forlin, Earle, Loreman, et al, ).…”

Editorial: teachers’ attitudes and self‐efficacy beliefs with regard to inclusive education

“…The first paper, written by Alexander Büssing, Susanne Menzel, Valerie Beckmann, and Melanie Basten, investigates to what extent universalism values, that is, values that are assumed to ‘apply to all of humankind and to the natural environment’ (Schwartz, , p. 713), which in turn validate the construct of Human Rights, relate to teachers’ beliefs and enthusiasm towards inclusive education. Their study involved a sample of 229 biology pre‐service teachers who completed a paper‐pencil survey including several scales, such as the widely used revised version of the sentiments, attitudes and concerns about inclusive education scale (Sentiments, Attitudes, and Concerns about Inclusive Education–revised; Forlin, Earle, Loreman, et al, ). Results of their cross‐sectional study indicated that universalism is associated with all three dimensions of teachers’ attitudes (sentiments, attitudes and concerns).…”