The Development of the Educators’ Attitudes toward Gifted Education Scale

Abstract

This article reports a study intended to develop a scale that measures attitudes of preschool through university in-service educators toward gifted education. After a thorough review of the literature on the topic, the first version of the scale was developed with 24 Likert-type items intended to measure four dimensions of the construct (six items for each). The scale was given to 421 preschool through university in-service educators (teachers, school counselors, school administrators, etc.) working at various schools or educational institutions in Istanbul, Turkey during the 2011-2012 school year. After a listwise deletion of missing data, the analyses were done on 360 cases. Based on results from exploratory factor analysis on one half of the data, nine items were eliminated and 15 retained. The revised scale could still measure all four dimensions with at least three items each. The factor structure of the revised version of the scale could be cross-validated on the second half of the data through confirmatory factor analysis. Internal consistency reliability coefficients of the whole revised scale and the subscales were acceptable. The resulting scale is a valid and reliable instrument with the potential to be adapted to various educational systems in the world.