A Global Set of Dispositions? Applying Discrete-Choice Method to Measure Global Citizenship Dispositions of Secondary-School Students in Two Nations
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Date
2020-09-24
Authors
Thier, Michael
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Global citizenship education is a fast-growing reform of crucial domestic and international importance. Unfortunately, schools that aim to offer global citizenship education have no way to determine if they are providing anything besides a traditional approach. Moreover, communities that want to join this burgeoning movement lack an evidence-generating mechanism to lobby for needed funds or approvals. Among nearly 150 extant measures relating to global citizenship, each has troubling limitations that could undermine their uses in secondary schools, such as being designed (a) for respondents at universities or multinational corporations; (b) absent rigorous psychometric testing; (c) without accounting for multidimensionality confounds (i.e., global citizenship featuring dispositions, knowledge, skills, and behaviors); or (d) as self-reports, which can invite social desirability bias.
Seeking reliable data that would enable global citizenship educators’ valid inference-making for improving pedagogical practices or scaling up those that show promise, I designed this dissertation to develop a discrete-choice measure of global citizenship dispositions. Following an exploratory sequential design, this three-phase dissertation began with nominal group technique focus groups with 11 alumni/ae of International Baccalaureate Diploma Programmes in Sweden and the United States. Alumni/ae demonstrated social validity of eight consensus-defined global citizenship dispositions. Second, I drafted 120 items to operationalize four socially valid dispositions (Appreciation of Multiple Perspectives, Intercultural Sensitivity, Interest in Diversity, and Plural Geographic Allegiance), which an international panel of 18 global citizenship scholars vetted for content validity. Third, I pilot-tested content-valid items from socially valid dispositions with 182 Year 9 and 10 students. A confirmatory factor analysis and strong correlational evidence of items’ susceptibility to social desirability bias led me to construct a triadic discrete-choice measure that has demonstrated initial utility for assessing secondary-school students’ global citizenship dispositions and mitigating effects of social desirability.
This dissertation—designed to reconcile practical and scholarly tensions about global citizenship—did not solve all the problems of measuring its dispositions among secondary-school students. But it did yield a self-report alternative that has shown proof of concept based on data from diverse participants who have experienced, who have thought deeply and written about, and who engage daily in global citizenship education.
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Keywords
Discrete-choice methods, Global citizenship, International Baccalaureate, Mixed methods, Secondary schools, Social desirability bias