Is it possible to measure attitudes toward Social Justice in Education? Development and validation of a scale.

Author(s):

Reyes Hernández-Castilla(presenting / submitting)F.Javier Murillo Nina Hidalgo Cynthia Martinez-Garrido Haylen Perines

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

09. Assessment, Evaluation, Testing and Measurement

Format:

Paper

Session Information

09 SES 07 D, Developing and Validating Instruments for Tests and Assessments

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-09

17:15-18:45

Room:

395. [Main]

Chair:

Petr Soukup

Contribution

Is Social Justice present in the classroom? What are the teachers´ attitudes towards their commitment to injustices? How do they perceive the role of education in diminishing them? To answer these questions we aimed to build an instrument to measure and to answer these research questions. Since it does not exist in the literature specific scale, we have developed and validated an accurate instrument. These questions are part of a research funded by Ministry of Science and Innovation (Projects of Scientific Research and Technological Development. I+D+i, entitled "Schools for Social Justice" (Ref EDU2011-291143)).

To focus the meaning of Social Justice, we depart from the dynamic nature of the concept, which makes it particularly complex to measure it. We understand Social Justice as a three dimensional notion based on the model of the three "R" (Murillo & Hernández-Castilla, 2011), because it is based on Redistribution, Recognition and Representation ideas.

On the other hand, Social Justice in Education also involves three key ideas: An Education "for" Social Justice, as transformative of the society; which needs an education "in" Social Justice, understood as that which addresses the issue of Social Justice in the curriculum; and education "from" Social Justice, ie with just educational institutions (Dubet, 2005). This means how schools are organized and proceed in coherence with the eigenvalues of Social Justice.

As background to the measurement of Education and Social Justice, Rubin and Peplau (1973, 1975) built a 20 items "Just World Scale" (EMJ), after reviewing this application Dalbert, Montada & Schmitt (1987) propose a six-item scale assessing beliefs in a Just World (Dalbert, 2009; Ritter, Benson & Snyder, 1990). But also at the beginning of the 90s, Lipkus (1991) offered the seven-items global Scale Belief in a Just World".

Concentrated on a Rawls’ Social Justice concept, Torres-Harding, Siers & Olson (2012) built a 24-item "Scale of Social Justice”. It has been constructed in order to understand what are socio-cognitive processes involved. Furthermore, the "Scale of beliefs: Learning to Teach for Social Justice" in Ludlow, Enterline & Cochran-Smith (2008) of 12 items measured on the one hand, the beliefs of teachers towards the redistribution of resources, and on the other, the believes that teaching (education) for Social Justice is a measurable result of the teacher training.

In order to valuate such beliefs, Enterline, Cochran-Smith, Ludlow, & Mitescu (2008) analysed the data from the "Learning to Teach Social Justice" questionnaire (LTSJ-B). Ginns, Fryer, Amazan, McCormicky & Loughland (2014) improve the scale. Finally, a newly built instrument, survey of Social Justice," done by Jacott et al. (2014) addresses the teachers and students conceptions about Social Justice Evaluation Questionnaire.

The "Scale of Attitudes Toward Social Justice in Education (EAJSE)" emerges from the theoretical framework presented in this article and as a review of other related scales above-mentioned.

• Attitudes toward Social Justice: Assesses the teachers’ attitude towards injustice situations. It measures teachers’ sympathy and beliefs to discriminations.

• Attitudes toward Social Justice in Education: it seeks what teachers think about the role of education in achieving a more just society.

• Involvement/commitment of the teaching staff with the Social Justice: it measures teacher involvement with a socially just education (in terms of Redistribution of resources, Recognition of all students and involving them in school and society).

Method

In the development and validation of the scale four scales have been employed; our scale and three other close scales were used. • Attitudes Toward Social Justice in Education Scale (EAJCE) GICE*: The original consisted in a 16 items scale and was developed by researchers of the research group "Educational Change for Social Justice". The items were made from the three concepts involved: Social Justice in society, Education for Social Justice and Commitment to Social Justice. A team of several experts in Social Justice in Education validated it. Therefore, the scale items match (i) Commitment of teachers, (ii) Role of Education for Social Justice and (iii) Social Justice. • Global Belief in a Just World Scale (Lipkus, 1991): It measures the belief in a Just World, comprising a 7-item Likert scale. Original reliability is .83, a single factor is present and an alpha of .81 index was obtained. • Social Justice Scale (SJS) (Torres-Harding, Siers & Olson, 2012): Composed of 29 items .91, with a 7 Likert alternatives. It consists on four subscales: Attitudes Toward Social Justice (α=.95); Perceived behavioural control (α=.84); Behavioural intentions (α= .88), and subjective Standards (α= .82). After the translation and validation of the scale identical data as the original has been obtained (α=.904) • Believes- Learning to Teach for Social Justice Scale Ludlow, Enterline and Cochran-Smith (2012). A 12 items scale with five response alternatives. The reliability of the scale is .77. Factorial analysis indicates the existence of two subscales that explain the 34.1% of the variance. The factor 1 (positive questions), explained 17.7% of variance, and factor 2 (negative questions) explained 16.4% of the total variance. The correlation between the two factors is .36. The sample has been 326 students from different courses of Teaching Training in Early Childhood Education (45.4%) and Primary Education (54.6%) of the Autonoma University of Madrid (Spain), of which the 21.5% are female, in similar proportion to that of students. And 135 Secondary Teachers from different Spanish Comunities. **GICE: Grupo de Investigación Cambio Educativo para la Justicia Social (Research Group Educational Change for Social Justice. Autonoma University of Madrid (Spain).

Expected Outcomes

The results of the study on the original scale on its internal consistency, construct validity, and convergent and discriminant validity. a) Internal consistency: Reliability is quite high with α =.80 (n=518). The discrimination analysis suggests that three items have low discrimination (n7, n4 and n5 items). The Cronbach Alpha would increase to .813 points if item 7 were removed. b) Construct validity: factor analysis shows to the existence of four different factors. In the study of the revised scale with 14 items and is it discussed: a) Internal consistency: Cronbach's alpha of the complete test of 14 items is 0.83, which can be considered reasonably high. (Subscale 1: .83; Subscale 2: .75; Subscale 3: .87) b) Construct validity: The factorial analysis confirms the existence of three factors that correspond to our theoretical framework; c) Convergent and Discriminant Validity: The subscale EAJSE related to attitudes toward Social Justice shows a statistically significant correlation with the scale of Lipkus (1991) and this is small and negative. Thus, the data shows that the scale of Social Justice correlates with two subscales EAJSE and 3, and in both cases of positive and form reasonably high. It is especially high (.5) with Personal Commitment subscale. Scale of beliefs Learning to Teach for Social Justice. The behaviour of the relationship between this scale and EAJSE is very similar to behaviour Scale Social Justice, with the same subscales correlated, though somewhat analogous lower intensity. This is interesting since the correlation between these scales is high (.48), but does not match.

References

Dalbert, C., Montada, L. & Schmitt, M. (1987). The belief in a just world as a motive: Validity correlates of two scales. Psychologische Beiträge, 29, 596-615. Dalbert, C. (2009). Belief in a just world. En M. Leary y R. Hoyle (Coords.), Handbook of individual differences in social behavior (pp. 288-297). Nueva York: Guilford Publications. Enterline, S., Cochran-Smith, M., Ludlow, L.H. & Mitescu, E. (2008). Learning to teach for social justice: Measuring change in the beliefs of teacher candidates. The New Educator, 4(4), 267-290. Ginns, P., Fryer, L., Amazan, R., McCormick, A. & Loughland, A. (2014). Evaluation of the Learning to Teach for Social Justice–Beliefs Scale in an Australian context. Higher Education Research & Development, 95(3), 1-13. Jacott, L., Maldonado, A., Sainz, V., Juanes, A., García-Vélez, T. & Seguro, V. (2014). Representations of social justice amongst Spanish teachers and students. En P. Cunningham y N. Fretwell (Eds.), Innovative Practice and Research Trends in Identity, Citizenship and Education (pp. 122-139). Londres: CiCe. Lipkus, I. (1991). The construction and preliminary validation of a global belief in a just world scale and the exploratory analysis of the multidimensional belief in a just world scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 12(11), 1171-1178. Ludlow, L.H., Enterline, S.E. & Cochran-Smith, M. (2008). Learning to Teach for Social Justice-Beliefs Scale: An Application of Rasch Measurement Principles. Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, 40(4), 194. Murillo, F.J. & Hernández-Castilla, R. (2011a). Hacia un concepto de justicia social. REICE. Revista Iberoamericana sobre Calidad, Eficacia y Cambio en Educación, 9(4), 7-23. Murillo, F.J. & Hernández-Castilla, R. (2011b). Trabajar por la Justicia Social desde la Educación. REICE. Revista Iberoamericana sobre Calidad, Eficacia y Cambio en Educación, 9(4), 3-6. Murillo, F.J. & Hernández-Castilla, R. (2014). Liderando Escuelas Justas para la Justicia Social. Revista Internacional de Educación para la Justicia Social (RIEJS), 3(2), 7-27. Ritter, C., Benson, D.E. & Snyder, C. (1990). Belief in a just world and depression. Sociological Perspectives, 33, 235-252. Rubin, Z. & Peplau, L.A. (1975). Belief in a just world a reactions to another´s lot: a study of national draft lottery. Journal of Social Issues, 29(4) 73-93. Torres-Harding, S.R., Siers, B. & Olson, B.D. (2012). Development and psychometric evaluation of the Social Justice Scale (SJS). American journal of community psychology, 50(1-2), 77-88.