Theses and Dissertations Collection

This study focuses on pre-service teachers’ experiences and beliefs about critical literacy, the importance of critical literacy, and the lack of explicit practices known about how to teach critical literacy in pre-service teacher education. Data were collected for eight weeks using the Critical Literacy Beliefs Survey (CLBS-1). A sample (N=405) of pre-service teachers from across the United States were recruited to take the Critical Literacy Beliefs Survey. The CLBS-1 was developed to examine pre-service teachers’ beliefs of critical literacy and answer the following research question: To what extent does the Critical Literacy Beliefs Survey (CLBS-1) represent the hypothesized dimensions of critical literacy found in the literature?Survey-development methods (Johnson & Morgan, 2016) were used to examine if Lewison et al.’s (2002) critical literacy framework can be rendered into a quantitative instrument to explore pre-service teachers’ critical literacy beliefs. Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), the factor structure of the CLBS-1 was examined and compared to the collected data from a pre-service teacher sample. Findings from the CFA showed a three-factor structure. Model fit was satisfactory upon revision (CFI = .93, TLI = .91, RMSEA = .09, SRMR = .05). The current findings can be discussed only in the context of the sampled population, contingent upon the revision of the CLBS-1 through multiple iterations with a random population of pre-service teachers to deem this instrument a valid and reliable measure of their critical literacy beliefs. More surveying on and with this teacher population is needed to further explore how critical literacy can be examined in larger-scale studies.