The Attitudes Of Normally Developing Students Towards Peers With Special Educational Needs In Mainstream Classes

The attitudes of classmates or friends towards peers with disabilities can be regarded as an environmental factor that might facilitate or inhibit the social participation of students with special educational needs in inclusive classrooms. Therefore, assessing the attitudes of students towards peers with disabilities may be an important step towards improved social participation of students with SEN in inclusive schools. That?s way this research was planned and conducted to investigate the attitudes of normally developing students towards peers with special educational needs in mainstream classes. Totally 100 voluntary students were selected by a simple random sampling method from Primary School of Çayyolu Gökku?a?? which is given mainstream education depending on Ministry of National Education. For all variables frequencies and descriptive statistics were first computed. According to the study, majority of students (90.0 %) reported that there was not any disabled person in their families. It was found that 90.0 % of them have knowledge about disabled person and they claimed 85.0 % of them gained the information from their school. Besides, most of them (75.0 %) satisfied with their mainstream education. Students? attitudes towards peers with special educational needs were assessed by means of the CATCH developed by Rosenbaum et al (1988). It has very good psychometric properties, especially in comparison to other measures assessing the attitudes of peers toward children with disabilities. Children answer to statements assessing the affective, behavioral and cognitive attitude components, 12 statements for each component. According to the t-test analyses, it was found that there were significant relations between gender and the cognitive attitude component. Among the participants, girls had higher total scores than boys. High scores indicate more positive attitudes. To determine whether there was a significant effect between the status of having knowledge about people with disabilities and attitudes of peers toward children with disabilities, Mann-Whitney U analysis was conducted. It was obtained that there was statistically significant difference between those who answer yes and no and the scores of behavioral attitude component. As a result of a two-way ANOVA, the mean attitude scores of sixth grade students who are satisfied with the inclusive education are higher than the other classes. When the variance table is examined, the variables of class and satisfaction were statistically significance at the 0.05 significance level. In addition, the class was found to have no impact on attitude scores depending on the level of satisfaction.