The objective was to gather relevant, general and nuanced information about the aforementioned problem, making inferences without manipulating the independent variables in any way.
Selection of the surveying method for the present research sought to know the teachers’ perception with regards to the Improvement Strategies that target diversity in Compulsory Secondary Education. This is because there was a lack of information on what the main protagonists, the teachers, think in relation to this topic. To address this, we state here our agreement with Kerlinger [
30], who states that “it is significant that even though hundreds of thousands of words are written and spoken about education and what people think about it, little reliable information is available on the topic” [
30].
2.1. Participants
The population and study sample of the present research is constituted by a group of teachers who deliver teaching within the three Secondary Education Centres that have integrated Quality Management Systems in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia. Centres were selected for inclusion using a convenience sampling strategy. The selected centres were those which demonstrated willingness to participate in the research.
Taking as a basis the information provided by the directors of the Centres, the population was made up of 135 teachers. All of these identified teachers were invited to participate in the research, with 112 teachers providing data. This represents 82.96% of the overall population invited, of which 50 (44.8%) were male and 63 (55.2%) female.
Considering the teachers trained in Therapeutic Pedagogy, the average length of teaching experience was 13.6 years, relative to an average of 17.9 years of experience amongst those who did not possess this qualification. Consequently, this reveals that teachers who are not qualified in this area are in possession of greater teaching experience.
Table 1 presents the distribution, frequency and percentage of teachers that constitute the sample.
2.2. Instrument
Just as has been presented, the instrument sought to obtain the perception of teaching staff relating to improvement strategies and attention to diversity. Thus, having reviewed the existing literature and checked that there was no instrument available that could adequately address our objectives, we proceeded to develop our own.
An ad hoc questionnaire for the evaluation of the quality of strategies addressing diversity was, therefore, the instrument used. This paper and pen tool was divided into the following dimensions: school environment, definition of the improvement strategy, planning of the improvement strategy, curricular design, human resources addressing diversity, equipment and resources. These are composed by 10, 8, 5, 6, 6 and 3 items, respectively. The instrument included a series of closed questions rated along a Likert-type response scale running from 1 to 5 (1 being not important and 5 being very important) which describes the degree of importance given by the teachers to the different dimensions. These dimensions must be considered when attending to diversity and improving quality within educational centres.
In order to assure content validity of the instrument, the opinion of a group of nine teachers was taken into consideration. This included teachers from the Faculty of Education Sciences working in the ambit of methodology, alongside secondary education teachers who were trained in Therapeutic Pedagogy and worked in the ambit of attention to diversity.
The number of experts was nine and a numeric rating scale was used which ranged between 1 and 4, with 1 being nothing and 4 being totally.
Thus, the highest score that could be obtained for both the dimensions and the items was 9 × 4 = 36. We established 9 × 3 = 27 as a cut point, considering 1 and 2 negative, and 3 and 4 positive. In this first part, six dimensions were validated: Environment of the educational centre, definition of the improvement strategy, planning of the improvement strategy, educational programs for the students, human resources addressing diversity, equipment and resources. First, we proceeded to validate the dimensions, followed by the items. As a result of validation, the name of the dimension “educational programs for the students” was modified and the title “curricular design” was instead used. Further, of the 57 items initially proposed, 53 items remained in the definitive version.
After carrying out content validity, we conducted a factorial analysis in order to establish construct validity of all of the dimensions. Following Rodríguez, Gil and García [
31], this was carried out attending to the conditions of application, determination of commonalities, the extraction method and the rotation method.
For the study of internal consistency of the questionnaire, the reliability estimation coefficient, Cronbach alpha, was calculated. In
Table 2, we present data for both the dimensions and the overall instrument. We highlight that the reliability coefficient value observed in all cases is sufficiently high, serving to validate the inferences and conclusions drawn in the present research.
2.3. Procedure
The process began through interviews with the directors of each one of the participating educational centres. Participants were explained all of the details of the research and they then verified their motivation and commitment to participate, making administration of the instrument possible.
A researcher from the study team travelled to each educational centre in order to administer the questionnaires to the teaching staff. The teachers who participated in the study did so voluntarily and confidentiality of the results was guaranteed. Once the completed instruments were collected, the coding, ordering and computer recording of the responses in the database was carried out for their subsequent statistical treatment in SPSS version 25.0 statistical package for Macintosh (IBM ® SPSS® Statistics 25) (Manufacturer name, City, State Abb, Country).