Date of Award

10-11-2024

Publication Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.Sc.

Department

Kinesiology

Keywords

Inclusion;Inclusive Education;Physical Education;Scale Development

Supervisor

Sara Scharoun Benson

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to further develop the North American Attitudes Towards Inclusive Physical Education (NA-ATIPE) scale. This research focused on reliability, inter-item correlation, and item-total correlation. Participants included 194 North American in-service teachers recruited through Prolific. Results indicate that the original Attitudes Towards Inclusive Physical Education (ATIPE) scale demonstrated low internal consistency, while the reconceptualized NA-ATIPE scale showed high internal reliability. Item reduction analysis revealed that all NA-ATIPE items had adequate inter-item and item-total correlations, indicating no need for item removal. A secondary aim of this thesis was to explore the prediction of attitudes based on various demographic factors (e.g., age, teacher category, highest level of education, gender, etc.). Findings revealed that generalist teachers who teach PE displayed more inclusive attitudes than generalist teachers who do not teach PE, and participants with a bachelors degree showed more inclusive attitudes than participants with master’s and doctoral degrees. Here, it is important to acknowledge the unequal distribution of participants in these groups (e.g., small sample size of participants with a doctoral degree compared to a bachelors degree) when interpreting results. Future directions involve scale evaluation (e.g., longevity), with the intent to provide a scale that can appropriately assess teachers' attitudes towards inclusive PE in a North American context, in the hope of creating a more inclusive atmosphere for students.

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