Teachers' representations and attitudes towards SLD diagnoses: Construction and preliminary validation of a questionnaire

This work presents a questionnaire developed to gather and explore teachers' attitudes and representations in respect to the recent considerable increase of Specific Learning Disability (SLD) diagnoses in Italian schools. The RADSA questionnaire (acronym including the Italian equivalent of SLD: "DSA") has been constructed on the basis of the reference literature and of 11 focus groups with 92 Italian primary school teachers (96.7% females, age M = 47.2 years, SD = 8.8). Transcripts of focus groups have been analyzed with T-Lab software (Lancia 2012, 2018) and contents have been converted in questionnaire items. Subsequently, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA - Direct Oblimin rotation) was conducted on the responses of 111 Italian primary school teachers, mostly females (94.6%), who participated in the second phase of the study. The age range of this second sample was from 25 to 63 years (M = 46.1, SD = 9.34), with a mean length service of 20.18 (SD = 11.49). RADSA questionnaire, thanks to its 62 items loading on 12 subscales, resulted capable of reflecting the complexity of the topic. It represents an assessment tool aimed at exploring teachers' and educators' attitudes towards SLD diagnosis, especially those representations that can undermine the quality of teacher-student relationship. Since RADSA can identify the main attitudes concerning pupils with an SLD diagnosis, intervention targeted on a specific educational context can be designed on the basis of the results obtained from its administration.