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The development and validation of the educators' beliefs about diversity scale
Abstract
A scale designed to measure educators' personal and professional beliefs about diversity was developed and tested for reliability and validity. The Educators' Beliefs About Diversity Scale (EBAD) consists of 22 items measuring personal beliefs about diversity (i.e., in the context of one's daily life) and 23 items measuring professional beliefs about issues of diversity (i.e., in the context of schools and classrooms). In a field test of practicing teachers and preservice teachers, the EBAD showed acceptable internal consistency reliability. For the practicing teachers (n = 269), the total scale Cronbach's alpha was.70 for the personal beliefs scale and.77 for the professional beliefs scale. For preservice teachers (n = 492), Cronbach's alpha was.80 for the personal beliefs scale and.82 for the professional beliefs scale. For both practicing and preservice teachers, scores on the EBAD Scale were not significantly related to scores on the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. Therefore, the scores on the EBAD scale did not seem to be influenced by one's desire to respond in a socially desirable manner. Several relationships among scores were tested for their predictive validity. For both practicing and preservice teachers, the strongest relationship existed between personal and professional beliefs. Other relationships found to be significantly related to personal and professional beliefs were perceived level of multicultural knowledge and cross-cultural experiences. Differences in belief scores existed between males and females and among various religious groups. Implications of the data for scale revisions, future research, and future practice are discussed.
Subject Area
Bilingual education|Multicultural education|Teacher education|Educational evaluation
Recommended Citation
Pohan, Cathy A, "The development and validation of the educators' beliefs about diversity scale" (1994). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9507822.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9507822