Development And Preliminary Application Of Special Education School Culture Assessment Scale Based On Modern Special Education Concept

The key to the development of the school is school culture. The overall quality of education is relying on the development and improvement of school culture. Because of the special nature of its educational objects, special education schools must have its differences on physical environment, institutional environment, conduct and spirit. Lack of school culture will lead to special education school principals and teachers deviation its development planning. Many researches of school culture in Chinese mainly focused on theoretical explanations in regular school. However, the study of special education school culture is hardly, and the study of assessment of special education school culture is as few as the star in the morning. Special education school culture measurement is the key problem of special education school culture, not only further determine the structure model of special education school culture, but also provide the possibility to understand the level of the current situation, and it’s also the cornerstone of future intervention study. This study aims to design special education school culture assessment scale based on modern concepts of special education, and conduct the preliminary investigation in order to further verify the actual feasibility of scale.Firstly, the study based on the literature review and interviews determined the structure and specific questions of the scale, then assessed the expert validity of the formation, and designed the special education school culture predict Scale based on modern concepts of special education; secondly, in order to build the formal scale of special education school culture, the study make the item analysis and exploratory factor analysis to predict scale; thirdly, a sample of 739 special education principals and teachers was tested with Special Education School Culture Scales, and a sample of 656 was valid, the effective rate is 88.77%. The Project Analysis, Cronbach A coefficient, Exploratory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Model testing and other statistical methods were statistically analyzed in the study.The major findings were as follows:1、Special Education School Culture Scale consists of 21 items, constituted by four dimensions:material culture, institutional culture, behavior, spiritual culture. The material culture consists of 7 items, and institutional culture consists of 5 items, and behavior culture consists of 4 items, and spiritual culture consists of 5 items.2、The Reliability Assessment of Special Education School Culture Scale showes that Internal Consistency Coefficient of Special Education School Culture Scale was 0.938, Split-half Reliability was 0.863, the scale has a high reliability. At the same time Scale also has the high Content Validity, Construct Validity, and Convergent Validity. The four dimensions of the scale has good factor structure, and the factor scores are between 0.60-0.84, explained 63.37% of total variance. Absolute Adaptation and Corresponding Indicators showed the perfect fitness of the model, and it can be used to explain the actual observed variables.3、There are significant differences in the level of cultural development among the different area of special education schools, school age, types of school. For the different school type, the school culture in special schools for mental retardation is better than the schools for hearing impairment and the special schools for different kinds of disabilities; and for the different school age, the special schools which history more than 21 years built the most successful school culture than the special schools which history less than 10 years, but the special schools which history less than 10 years built the most successful school culture than the special schools which history between 11 and 20 years; then for the different area, the special schools in provincial capital and Municipalities, its school culture are better than the special school in prefecture-level cities. Special education school culture in prefecture-level cities is better than the special education school in county cities.4、Special Education School Culture Scales based on the modern special education concept can detect cultural construction in the different special education schools, help special education school self-assessment, provide construction-oriented status quo for improving special education school culture.