Development of the Scale to Measure Indonesian Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Students with Special Needs in an Inclusive Education Setting

The current study aims to develop the new scale to measure attitudes toward students with special needs in inclusive education for Indonesian teachers. Until now, there is no instrument to measure teachers’ attitudes toward inclusive education developed in Indonesia. It was validated by experts, two times by pilot studies, and three times by revisions. In addition, it incorporated five new items specific to Indonesia, developed by analysing government regulations and teacher interviews. A total of 499 teachers were involved in the first pilot study process and 1,209 teachers in the second stage. The teachers were from three provinces in Indonesia, namely Yogyakarta, East Java and West Java. After the data was collected, testing with Principal Component Analysis was carried out. In addition, Cronbach’s alpha correlation and Pearson product-moment correlation test were used to test the construct validity and the correlation of each component. Finally, 22 items were selected as products that can be used to measure teacher attitudes. The result of this research was that the scale was valid and reliable; the Principal Component Analysis value by varimax with Kaiser normalisation was 0.541 to 0.800, and the Cronbach’s alpha value was 0.821 (α = 0.821). In the second trial phase, the results of the correlation analysis show that each component is significant. The level of significance of each component is, on average, 1%. Therefore, in the future, the scale called the Indonesian Teachers Attitudes toward Inclusive Education (ITAIE) Scale would be worthwhile to measure teachers’ attitudes toward students with special needs in an inclusive education setting more broadly and to cover a broader area in Indonesia.