Design and validation of an instrument to listen the student voice in specialized open classrooms

Abstract

The voices of students with serious and permanent special educational needs have been excluded from the research processes in which they have been involved. Therefore, it is necessary to have instruments to collect their opinions and give them visibility. The main objective of this work is to design and validate an adapted questionnaire to the characteristics of students with serious and permanent special education needs who are enrolled in the Open Specialized Classrooms. This work has counted with the participation of 21 professionals in inclusive education and methodology, using the technique of focal groups as the main methodological strategy. The mixed nature of the data implies a double treatment, for which the Atlas-Ti Version 8 program was used and the statistical package SPSS V.24 to analyse the inter-judge concordance. The results show that a valid questionnaire has been designed for the purpose that was intended. Moreover, the focus groups have been established as an adequate way to construct and validate instruments.