Cognitive Algebra Underlying Special Education Teachers’ and Psychology Students’ Attitudes Towards School Inclusion of People with Intellectual Disability

Abstract

Attitudes towards regular school inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are affected by factors such as disability severity, educational level, and teacher experience. Nevertheless, the ways that teachers integrate these factors to form inclusion judgments remains unclear. The current paper explores what systematic cognitive algebra rules are used to cognitively integrate this set of inclusion factors by special education teachers and psychology students. To do so, 469 special education teachers and psychology students were asked to take part in two experimental cognitive algebra studies. In each study, participants had to read a set of school inclusion scenarios and rate the probability that a scenario actor with ID could be successfully integrated into a regular school program. To this purpose, factor effects on successful school inclusion and ID related to individuality, situational aspects, and contextual considerations (e.g., school environment, grade level taught) were explored. Results suggested that participants showed attitudes to school inclusion ranking from light to moderate positive values. Situational factors, as well as context factors, were judged to be more significant than other factors in elementary education. These factors were integrated by following a cognitive summative rule. Overall, judgment for successful school inclusion follows a summative rule to integrate sources of information. This rule is maintained irrespective of the disability under consideration. However, valuation of each source of information does depend on the type of the current study sample. Implications of these results for inclusion of people with disabilities in regular schools are discussed in this paper.

Functional Measurement of Special Education Teachers’ and Students’ Expectations Toward Job Training for Persons with Intellectual Disability

“…Furthermore, other research findings have pointed out that cognitive rules to form expectations of success for the job training of PWID could vary depending on the evaluated educational level. For example, unlike the results obtained here, research considering job training of PWID at the elementary school level (preschool, primary school, and high school) has suggested that judgments of success are based on information integration summative cognitive rules in success [22]. This could be the case because job training has a greater temporal proximity to independent living than it does to early education.…”

“…Overall, results suggest that when PWID are training for a job, teachers and students in the special education system consider that successful job training depends more on individual than on contextual factors. It would be very interesting to explore other contextual variables as suggested in previous research (e.g., teaching variables [22]). Furthermore, other research findings have pointed out that cognitive rules to form expectations of success for the job training of PWID could vary depending on the evaluated educational level.…”

“…The IIT approach provides a method to visually identify data patterns from factor interaction graphs to determine universal cognitive principles preceding behavior in several domains (e.g., attitudes toward sexuality [17], love [18], and medical concerns [19]), including the daily life of persons with atypical cognitive development (e.g., moral judgment and Down syndrome [20], love and intellectual disability [21], school inclusion attitudes [22,23], the attitude of PWID toward sexual intercourse [24,25,26]).…”

Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Engineering Students’ Desire to Cheat During Online and Onsite Statistics Exams

“…By considering this cognitive specification schema, this research aims to determine the way students take the decision to cheat by analysing psychological valuation (V) as well as to cognitively specify algebraic integration of information (I operator) in order to put under scrutiny the observed cheating behaviour (R). The cognitive algebra paradigm has been used to explore a variety of human behaviour domains (Castro, Morales, Lopez, Olivares, & Masip, 2018;Esterle, Munoz-Sastre, & Mullet, 2008;Falconi & Mullet, 2003;Herve, Mullet, & Sorum, 2004;Morales, 2012;Morales-Martinez, Lopez-Ramirez, Esterle, Munoz-Sastre, & Mullet, 2010), including special education (e.g., Morales, Lopez, Villarreal-Trevino, Montalvo, Mezquita-Hoyos, & Castro-Sanchez, 2014), technical education for work settings (e.g., Morales-Martinez, Lopez-Ramirez, Villarreal-Trevino, & Mezquita-Hoyos, 2015) and academic self-efficacy in middle education (e.g., Briones-Rodriguez, Morales-Martinez, Santos-Alcantara, Lopez-Ramirez, & Urdiales-Ibarra, 2016) and higher education (e.g., Villarreal-Trevino, Villarreal-Lozano, Morales-Martinez, Lopez-Ramirez, & Flores-Moreno, 2017). However, academic dishonesty has never been explored from an IIT perspective, and the goal of this research is to introduce this approach in the field of academic dishonest behaviour by answering the question: What are the cognitive information integration mechanisms that might lead to academic cheating?…”

Information Integration Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Face-to-Face or Online Statistics Test Anxiety Judgments of Engineering Students

“…Applying the IIT principles to the educational field, it is possible to observe the information selection and integration processes in the teachers' and learners' minds that allow them to judge their circumstances and make academic decisions. For example, in Mexico, special education teachers were found to use a summative cognitive rule to judge the probability that a person with an intellectual disability (ID) would be successfully integrated into mainstream education (Morales et al, 2014). On the other hand, they used a multiplicative cognitive rule to judge the probability that a person with ID could learn a skill through technical training (Morales et al, 2015).…”