Teachers' educational attitudes towards gifted and talented education: validation of the AEPAC scale

Abstract

Teachers’ attitudes shape the educational response to gifted and talented students. To enhance teacher training in gifted education, it is vital to understand teachers’ attitudes towards it. There are several instruments to assess teaching attitudes in this field, but the «Opinions about the gifted and their education (OGE)» questionnaire developed by Gagné (1991) is one of the most used instruments nowadays. The present study identifies the necessity of creating a new tool. Therefore, the main aim of our study is to create and validate a scale in Spanish that assesses teachers' attitudes towards gifted and talented education. We chose the instrument «Determining Attitudes Toward Ability (DATA)» as the foundation for translation and adaptation into Spanish to achieve our aim. After performing an exploratory factor analysis, a lack of internal consistency was observed, so the scale was restructured, resulting in a new scale formed by three dimensions (elitism, curricular adaptation and acceleration), which was answered by 546 teachers from early childhood education to vocational training. After performing a confirmatory factor analysis with the new scale, favorable reliability and validity indices were obtained, resulting in an optimal scale for measuring teachers' educational attitudes towards gifted and talented education.