Evaluating the Quality of School Inclusion: Development and Validation of the Ecological Assessment Scale for Inclusion
The paper presents the process of developing and validating a European scale for measuring the quality of school inclusion for the Italian context, called the Ecological Assessment Scale for Inclusion (EASI). This tool was created as part of a project funded by the European Erasmus+ programme KA3 – Support for policy reforms entitled Algorithm for New Ecological Approaches to Inclusion «ECO-IN» (N. Id 612163-EPP-1-2019-1-IT-EPPKA3-IPI-SOC-IN). The EASI scale is a European tool, firstly because it was constructed and tested in four European nations: Italy, Romania, Lithuania and Spain. Secondly, because it aims to be used and disseminated throughout the continent, allowing each educational context to evaluate and then introduce improvements within its inclusive school system. The tool development process was carried out through a survey in which a tool developed in a previous European project, already published and called the Inclusive Processes Assessment Scale (Cottini et al., 2016), was re-proposed. Subsequently, focus groups were held with a wide
range of educational community players: managers, policymakers, teachers, families, secondary school students, psychologists and educators. The indicators that make up the EASI scale were developed from the results of the survey and focus groups. This study reports only the validation data from the Italian context.