Factorial validity of attitudes towards heterogeneous student groups

The current study investigates the construct validity of an instrument that assesses cognitive, affective and behavioral attitudes as well as intrinsic motivational orientation towards heterogeneous learning groups, held by N = 879 student teachers. The investigated instrument assesses attitudes and motivational orientations and contains five factors (utility, cost, negative emotions, competence and intrinsic motivation) which were assessed for three kinds (social, ethnic and performance) of heterogeneity. To investigate the factorial validity of this instrument we conducted multi-level confirmatory factor analyses to test the postulated structure at the within-person level (three five-dimensional measurements) and the between-person level (five-dimensional structure of person specific means over the three forms of heterogeneity) simultaneously. The results confirm the postulated structure on both levels, with level variant tau-congeneric measurement models. Closer inspection of intraclass correlation coefficients of the items and predictive effects of the form of heterogeneity on the five factors of attitudes towards heterogeneous learning groups imply, that the instrument can distinguish between the three forms of heterogeneity. We judge these findings as strong evidence for the construct validity of the instrument.