2017 Volume 20 Issue 1 Pages 25-36
[Purpose]
Improving teachers’ abilities to support their students is an urgent issue for preventing children’s problem behaviors. Therefore, I developed a scale to assess teachers’ abilities to support children from different perspectives and investigated the constitutive concept of teachers’ abilities to support children statistically.
[Methods]
Participants were teachers (N=404; 164 men and 240 women) in eight elementary schools and eight junior high schools in the Tohoku region. A tentative version of the “Child Support Ability Scale for Teachers.” Which contains 45 items rated on a four-point scale, was developed based on a survey of free descriptions. Furthermore, numbers of children with school refusal in each class and teachers’ worries were also investigated.
[Results]
Through item and factor analyses, five factors (i.e., counseling ability, ability to cooperate with other teachers, assessment ability, ability to cooperate with specialized agencies, and ability to control emotions) were statistically extracted. The scale’s administration indicated that:(1) female teachers and elementary school teachers had relatively high abilities for supporting children; (2) teachers’ worries and their abilities to support children were closely correlated; (3) teachers in classes with truants generally had lower abilities to support children, compared to teachers in classes without truants.
[Discussion]
It is suggested that effective future training programs for improving teachers’ abilities to support children should be investigated by using the scale developed in this study from the perspective of preventive and developmental educational counseling.
