Abstract

Students’ voices bring a number of benefits to the promotion of inclusive education. The purpose of this study is to identify and review survey questionnaires used to gather students’ voices of inclusion in secondary schools, with the aim to support researchers and stakeholders in selecting the most appropriate measure according to the purpose and context of their study. In this article, the Web of Science, Scopus, and ERIC databases were used to search for relevant articles. A systematic review of published studies from 1994 to 2024 identified inclusion survey questionnaires employed to gather secondary students’ voices. A total of 6 survey questionnaires were found and analyzed for descriptive information and psychometric validity. Of those, 5 articles included all psychometric properties. In addition, the analysis suggested attitude, experience, emotion, and social as common dimensions. This study contributes to inclusion literature by providing a useful resource to facilitate the appropriate selection of questionnaires that gather students’ voices of inclusion.

1. Introduction

Listening to the views of students with and without disabilities is important for it is considered as a catalyst for the promotion of inclusive education. Students' voices were among the reasons that led to improvements in thinking and practice ¹.

Some of the benefits of gathering student voice in systemic school level include its use in evaluating system-wide processes and procedures ², appropriateness of educational interventions ³, and its ability to help teachers improve their practice and professional qualities ⁴. Moreover, its benefits to individual students include the increase in their level of involvement and leadership ⁵, commitment to school through an enhanced valuing of learning and education ⁴, development of citizenship skills ^{6, 7}, and consistent growth in belonging and competence ⁸.

Student voice's basic tenet is that since students are the ones who know what works and what does not in their classrooms and schools, anyone seeking to enhance students' educational experiences must pay attention to their viewpoints, seek out their ideas, and treat their feedback seriously ⁹.

With regard to inclusive education, the use of survey questionnaires is one of the ways student voice is being gathered. The review of De Vroey and colleagues ¹⁰ identified the focus on the voice of students as a strength of the literature on inclusive education in secondary schools. Considering the number of benefits that student voice brings to the promotion of inclusive education, choosing the appropriate instrument for an inclusion measurement is important. However, it can be difficult given that inclusion construct as stated by ¹¹, has different definitions which can be understood in different ways, and that different emphases can be given by different authors and stakeholders. Therefore, it is difficult to measure or compare such a complex equity issue in the absence of a consensus definition of inclusion ¹².

A current literature search shows an absence of reviews that have assessed inclusion scales used to gather students’ voices for their validity and reliability.

Given this concern, this study aims to perform a systematic review of existing inclusion scales used to gather students’ voices in secondary schools. The aim of this review is to make an adequate contribution to the body of knowledge and to provide a useful resource to help researchers and stakeholders identify the appropriate and high-quality inclusion scales to use in gathering students’ voices. The research question addressed is: What are the descriptive characteristics and psychometric properties of the existing inclusion scales used to gather students’ voices in secondary schools?

To achieve this aim, a comprehensive review of inclusion scales will be performed and the descriptive and psychometric properties of each scale will be examined.

2. Method

This paper adhered to the eight-step guide introduced by ¹³ in conducting a systematic literature review. These steps include identifying the purpose, drafting the protocol and training the team, applying practical screen, searching for literature, extracting data, appraising quality, synthesizing studies, and writing the review.

The purpose of this study is to identify and review survey questionnaires used to gather students’ voices of inclusion in secondary schools. The study began with a broad search of the Web of Science, Scopus, and ERIC databases using the keywords inclusion or inclusive education in combination with questionnaire, instrument, survey, measure, or scale (e.g., “inclusion” AND “questionnaire”). To maintain the search within the scope of this review, eligibility criteria were applied. For the inclusion criteria, studies were included if they presented the development or use of a new or revised (quantitative) questionnaire that measured inclusion, inclusion climate or inclusive education, if the questionnaire was intended for completion by secondary students, if studies included at least some psychometric properties of the questionnaire, if the construct in the questionnaire is inclusion, inclusion climate or inclusive education, if the studies were published between 1994 and 2024, and if they were published in a peer reviewed journal. For the exclusion criteria, studies were excluded if they reported no psychometric properties, if the construct in the questionnaire is not inclusion, inclusion climate or inclusive education, if the questionnaire was aimed at teachers, and if the studies were not written in English.

Once the searches were completed, the articles were reviewed, and most of the articles were excluded. The study examined 417 articles in total. First, the titles and abstracts were screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria prior to consideration of the full text which resulted to exclusion of most of the articles. Only 31 studies remained which were considered for full text reading. A large majority of the articles were excluded from further review because the questionnaires were not intended to be completed by secondary students. Finally, 6 articles were retained for further analysis. These articles reported the development or use of a survey for measuring inclusion. In line with the methodology followed by ¹⁴ and ¹⁵, the articles were reviewed for descriptive information, instrument content, and psychometric performance.

The descriptive information included names of the instrument(s), details of the author(s), and year of publication. Study context along with the respondents' details were also provided. Further, information was collected regarding the sample size and the demographics of the respondents.

Further to the description of the instrument, the contents of the instrument were described in detail. The instrument contents included the number of items used in the study. Furthermore, the number of dimensions in each instrument was also presented. Along with the identification of the dimensions, the response scale used in the study was also identified.

To evaluate the psychometric strength of each survey questionnaire, a comprehensive review of the survey's performance was performed with respect to internal consistency/reliability, content validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. Although these standards were widely accepted and well-established, it is crucial to remember that their final acceptability is dependent on the context and goal of the study ¹⁶. Furthermore, a well-crafted survey questionnaire would, at the very least, meet the aforementioned requirements.

3. Results

The descriptive characteristics of the survey questionnaires are shown in Table 1. The study settings include rural and urban schools. In addition, studies were also found to be geographically diverse, conducted in different countries. Similarly, the number of respondents participating in these studies also varied from 277 to 855. Of the 6 reviewed articles, 4 articles included students with special education needs (SEN) as respondents of the study ^{17, 18, 19, 20}. Furthermore, the number of boys and girls who were included in the study ranges from 34%-52.8% and 47.2%-66% respectively.

Table 1 also shows the instrument content including the number of items and the number of dimensions. Along with the identification of the dimensions, the response scale used in the studies was also identified. The number of items in the instrument varied from 12 to 38. Reference ¹⁷ explicitly mentioned that the items in their Inclusion Climate scale were developed to address what schools and teachers do to make schools inclusive while the items in the Perception of Inclusion Questionnaire ¹⁸ were developed to report how students feel about their school. As for the Perceived Group Inclusion scale ²¹ the items were individual’s perception of the extent to which he or she is included based on cues and signals that are sent out by the group. Furthermore, the number of dimensions varied with a single dimension up to four dimensions. However, the common number of dimensions is two.

The articles on the measurement of inclusion had diverse contexts. Of the 6 articles, 4 survey questions examined inclusion at the school level ^{17, 18, 19, 22}, one at both the school and community levels ²⁰, and the other at the classroom level ²¹. Only 1 survey questionnaire is unidimensional ²² while the rest are multidimensional.

A number of dimensions were frequently assessed in the questionnaires. The most frequently assessed were attitude, experience, emotion, and social, identified through variants such as attitude and experience themselves, attitudes towards inclusion, emotional experience, emotional inclusion, school social climate, and social inclusion. All the different dimensions identified during the course of the study are presented in the measurement review in Table 2. The identified dimensions of inclusion are based on the context, the reviewed literature, and the methodology followed.

The scales examined in the present study were reviewed for a number of different psychometric properties. The psychometric properties of the survey questionnaires are shown in Table 2. Of the 6 reviewed articles, 5 articles displayed all psychometric properties. All 6 reviewed articles reported the internal consistency/reliability, content validity, and discriminant validity for the survey questionnaires while 1 survey questionnaire did not report how convergent validity was established ²⁰.

Of the 6 articles reviewed, 2 documented relationships with another variable. However, 1 of these two survey questionnaires focused on the dimensions rather than the inclusion scale as a whole toward their relationship with affective and productive outcomes ²¹ while the other one survey questionnaire assessed the relationship between inclusion climate and mathematics achievement ¹⁷.

4. Discussion

A search based on the Web of Science, Scopus, and ERIC provided no evidence of a study evaluating survey questionnaires for measuring the students’ voice of inclusion in secondary schools. Hence, this study to the best of the authors’ knowledge is one of the pioneer studies evaluating survey questionnaires designed to measure students’ voice of inclusion in secondary schools from 1994 to 2024. There were very few published questionnaires designed for this purpose, with only six questionnaires identified for review. This finding was expected given that rarely is any attention paid to what students have to say about their education, which seems to be a stunning omission in the research considering the rhetoric around student-centred education and valuing student voice ¹⁷. However, the results also revealed that scholars are increasingly using inclusion scales that are intended to gather students’ voice. By examining the survey questionnaires, the article provides details on their descriptive information, dimensions, and psychometric strength.

Inclusion has been an area of interest for academic research and stakeholders. Numerous surveys have been developed to assess inclusion and there is considerable variation in dimensions. This is due to differences in the conceptualization of inclusion that is in terms of the research purpose and to the context in which the inclusion study is undertaken. The Student Perceptions of Inclusion in Rural Canada scale ²⁰ was created in the context of rural inclusive education and the only survey among the six surveys reviewed that measured inclusion at the school and community levels. The Perceived Group Inclusion scale ²¹ conceptualized inclusion as an individual’s perception of the extent to which he or she is included which is primarily based on cues and signals that are sent out by the group. It is also the only scale among the six that complemented the conceptualization of inclusion with theories, namely optimal distinctiveness theory and self-determination theory. The Inclusion Climate scale ¹⁷ was developed based on a strength based approach to inclusion where each student is viewed as having strengths irrespective of having special needs and the items were developed to address what schools and teachers do to make schools inclusive. And the Perception of Inclusion Questionnaire ¹⁸ were developed to report how students feel about their school.

Further, there is a variety of different dimensions because the survey questionnaires varied also with respect to both the research settings in which they had been developed and utilized. In some cases, this occurs because survey questionnaires were developed for specific purpose such as inclusion in rural contexts ²⁰ and in different countries such as Canada, Spain and Germany.

The various dimensions can also be attributed to the different stakeholders, since inclusive education can be understood in different ways, and that different emphases can be given by different authors and stakeholders ¹¹. The survey questionnaires varied in their methodology used for development and were validated using data from students in regular, inclusive, or both classrooms and in urban, rural or both schools. Of the 6 survey questionnaires reviewed, 1 (16.67%) instrument explicitly mentioned the use of both experts and existing literature for development of the survey instrument, 1 (16.67%) instrument use experts only and 4 (66.67%) mentioned the use of existing literature sources. For 4 (66.67%) of the 6 survey questionnaires reviewed, data were collected from groups of students that include those with special needs for validation of the proposed instrument. In terms of grade levels, 2 (33.33%) of the 6 survey questionnaires focused on one grade level only.

Moreover, in the present study, 1 (16.67%) instrument was unidimensional, while 5 (83.33%) were multidimensional; this further strengthens the assumption that inclusion is a multidimensional construct.

There is also significant variation in the quality of the survey questionnaires. Of the 6 reviewed articles, 5 (83.33%) articles displayed all psychometric properties. This information makes it easier for other researchers to ascertain the appropriateness of measures for use in their research. A summary of the findings is presented in Table 3.

5. Conclusion

A variety of survey questionnaires measuring inclusion that gather students’ voices is indeed advantageous for researchers and stakeholders, offering them a good fit for the purpose and contexts they want to focus on. The primary objective of the article was to assist researchers and stakeholders in identification of the most suitable questionnaires to gather secondary students’ voices of inclusion in their schools. A number of factors have been identified to aid implementation of useful inclusion survey questionnaires.

First, it is worth noting that in a single instrument there should be consistency between the survey selected and the research context ²³. This simply refers to the fact that the choice of the survey instrument begins with an understanding of the inclusion dimensions most applicable to the specific setting and then a review of the questionnaires that measure those dimensions in relation to the research context. For instance, the SPIRC scale ²⁰ may not be entirely applicable to an urban setting, since the scale was purposely developed for rural inclusive education. Second, researchers may need to consider whether and how to adapt an existing survey to a new setting. The concept of inclusion may be different if the data are to be collected from a group of students in regular classrooms as compared to a group of students in inclusive classrooms, and survey items would need to be changed to reflect and appeal to the different set of respondents and research setting considering that inclusive classrooms include students with special education needs. Moreover, the reviewed scales were developed and utilized from different countries which add to the differences in the concept of inclusion. Finally, the measure should satisfy established criteria for psychometric validity. A validated survey instrument enables the researcher to have greater confidence in the results obtained.

The objective of the study was to assist the selection of an inclusion instrument that gathers secondary students’ voices through a detailed review of the descriptive and psychometric properties of the existing research questionnaires focused on measuring inclusion. However, in the future, researchers will need to develop their own questionnaires or measures to ascertain the level of inclusion in the context of their choice, for example, in the context of Filipino secondary students, since inclusion is given emphasis in the curriculum. The findings of the present research would help in the use of existing psychometrically valid measures.

References