A Self-Reported School Participation Assessment: Development

Abstract

Aim:The objectives of the present study were 1) to develop a school participation assessment (SPA) tool that reflects the school culture in South Korea.

Methods: During the development stage, a total of 50 initial items were compiled through literature review and review by current primary school teachers. The items were then deleted and revised to 39 items via a Delphi survey completed by an expert panel. Comprehensibility of these items were tested on 20 normal fourth to sixth grade students; based on this, the items were narrowed down to 34. Next, a survey was conducted on 482 normal fourth to sixth grade students.An exploratory factor analysis and item analysis were conducted to select the final items to be contained in the self-reported SPA tool, and as a result, a total of 25 items were selected. Data were analyzed using SPSS 21.0 (Statistical Package for Social Science 21.0). The present study performed an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and item analysis (IA) for selection of the final questions.

Results: Factors extracted via PCA are shown below (Table 7). A total of 8 factors with eigenvalues of 1or more were extracted, which explained 59.644% of total variance. Nine items with a communality of <.40 and a factor loadingof <.30 were deleted. The standard for corrected item-total correlation was set to .30-.80. The analysis results showed that the number of items with a correlation of≤ .30 was 1, which was a same item that was deleted based on EFA results, and thus, no additional items were deleted.

Conclusion: A self-reported SPA serves as the necessary tool for assessing perception of school participation that reflects the educational culture of South Korea.. The SPA tool can be useful to occupational therapists, teachers, and school health management professionals for intervention and assessing perception of school participation inchildren who are capable of participating in a self-report survey.