Educational Measurement and Evaluation Studies

Educational Measurement and Evaluation Studies

Constructing and Validating a Survey of Teachers’ Awareness of Dyslexia

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
1 Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, Department of English Language Teaching, Farhangian University of Mashhad, Iran
2 Full Professor of Applied Linguistics, Department of English Language, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran
3 Full Professor of Applied Linguistics, English Language and Literature Department, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran
10.22034/emes.2024.2026771.2561
Abstract
Objective: Dyslexia is the most common learning disorder in school children, which has been carefully investigated. This disease is characterized by a marked impairment in the growth and development of reading skills. The current study was conducted in order to develop and examine the construct validity of the questionnaire of teachers' awareness of dyslexia (TAD).
Methods: The present questionnaire was prepared and distributed among 416 primary school teachers in the public schools of Razavi Khorasan province who were selected through multi-stage cluster sampling. Participants were both male and female pre-service as well as in-service official teachers in the Ministry of Education. To substantiate the construct validity of the survey, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was employed using SPSS software, and to measure the factoriality of the inter-correlation matrix, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test of sampling adequacy and Bartlett's test of sphericity were used. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was also conducted using LISREL.
Results: The results of the the above-mentioned tests demonstrated that the factor model was appropriate. Moreover, the results of the rotated component matrix indicated that teachers' knowledge and understanding of students’ problems in lower order of processing, vocabulary, loss of concentration, and vocabulary decoding were the main four factors in the present questionnaire.
Conclusion: The questionnaire was constructed conducting exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and the obtained statistical results were analyzed. The questionnaire was found to be reliable and valid enough so as to examine teachers’ awareness of dyslexia. Finally, the implications were presented.
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