Validation of the Assessment of Culturally and Contextually Relevant Supports (ACCReS): Supporting Educators of Diverse Students with or at Risk for Disabilities

The PI will further develop and validate the ACCReS over the course of the 4-year project. In Year 1, the PI will establish the instrument's internal reliability and finalize the instrument, test manual, and scoring guide. Specifically, the PI will solicit qualitative feedback on the instrument from a stakeholder panel consisting of elementary, middle, and high school teachers of CLD students with or at risk for disabilities. Feedback will be focused on the instrument's directions, construct definitions, readability, item wording, and missing items. The PI will revise the instrument based on feedback from the panel and a follow-up pilot test will be conducted with a large representative sample of teachers. A confirmatory factor analysis will be conducted using data from the pilot test to establish the measure's construct validity. Lastly, the PI will finalize the instrument, along with the scoring guide (to aid teachers in providing numerical ratings of their own practices) and the test manual (to describe the instrument's technical adequacy and provide actionable steps to improve means or overall scores on each area of the instrument). In Year 2, the PI will establish the instrument's criterion-related validity by examining the extent to which ratings on the ACCReS are correlated with observations of teacher practices and student outcomes (i.e., observations of on-task and disruptive behavior and reading fluency). In Years 3 and 4, the PI will conduct two single-case experimental studies to determine response process validity (i.e., whether teachers understand the ACCReS in the way the researchers intended). The first study will take place in Year 3 and will test whether the completion of the ACCReS by teachers with substantial researcher coaching support leads to significant increases in culturally and contextually relevant teacher practice, improvements in student academic engagement, and decreases in students' disruptive behavior in classes where over 50% of students are CLD. The PI will conduct the second single-case study in Year 4 to extend findings from the Year 3 study and determine whether the same results occur when teachers complete the ACCReS independently, without researcher coaching support.