Engaged Teachers Scale for Special Educational Needs Teachers in Indonesia: A Rasch Model Approach

Abstract

Engaged Teachers Scale (ETS) is currently the only scale measuring teacher engagement. Although it has good validity when it was developed by Klassen et al (2013) in the UK, but there were not many have reported its validity when used in different cultural settings. Therefore, the ETS adaptation process is needed to apply the scale in different cultural contexts. Although the main tasks of teachers are similar in various countries, the teachers’ responsibility in handling special needs students should be considered in applying this scale for teachers in inclusive education. This study aims to adapt ETS to the context of inclusive education in Indonesia. The study participants were 340 primary inclusive school teachers (female= 76%; SD age= 1.02; SD teaching exp.= .82) from two cities in Indonesia. The result showed that the ETS had high values of the person and item interaction (α= .94). The quality of the item and person is good enough with person reliability = .72 and item reliability = .93. The average person logit value = 4.49 logit means that many people agree on all items. Separation value is 2.45 that indicates the two groups of teachers based on the degree of engagement. There were 3 misfit items with MNSQ score (.5 < MNSQ <1.5), those are item number 4, 10, and 12. The value of raw variance data is 45.4% (> 20%), indicates that the scale is unidimension. Based on the DIF plots, there is only one item shows teaching experience bias (item no 15, probability value .486 < 5%). In conclusion, ETS is recommended as an instrument to measure teachers’ engagement in Indonesian inclusive educational context by considering teacher experience as a demographic variable