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Category: Project

Description: Inclusive teacher education needs a substantially broader understanding of disability in order to critically reflect on previous and current concepts of disability. Main concepts of disability pertain to the individual-medical, social, systemic and cultural models, and have profound implications for developing inclusive teacher education. We therefore developed an instrument to, on the one hand, stimulate teaching trainees to critically deal with the term disability as a category and, on the other hand, capture their explicit concept of disability for teaching evaluations and research. Accordingly, in a study of 775 education students we developed and validated a 27-item measure of concepts of disability addressing the four most frequently used concepts of disability (i.e., individual-medical, social, ecological-systemic and cultural). Additionally, we employed the Attitudes towards Inclusion Scale (AIS), alongside key demographic variables. The instruments, data and analysis code used are available online at https://osf.io/dm4cs/ . Using confirmatory factor analyses, a general fit was obtained, with 15 items across the four dimensions in a CFA remaining. However, the dimensions correlated poorly with the attitudes towards inclusion, indicating that this measured an independent construct. This was also confirmed in an Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), in which 4 latent profiles in particular showed a difference between the individual-medical and the social concept of disability. The more experience students had with disability and the more courses they had on inclusive education, the more likely they were to agree with the social concept of disability.