General Educators' Attitudes Toward Students with Mild Disabilities and Their Use of Instructional Strategies

Abstract

In today's schools the demands of general educators to meet the diverse needs of their students have greatly increased. General educators need to have an increasingly large repertoire of instructional strategies to effectively meet their students' needs. In this study the frequency of several instructional strategies used by general educators at the middle school level (Grades 6, 7, and 8) was investigated. The frequency of the use of these instructional strategies by middle school teachers was compared to the amount of time they spent collaborating with special educators and also to the number of courses taken related to specialized techniques. This study also examined the attitudes general educators have toward the inclusion of students with mild disabilities. Findings indicated that the number of instructional strategies general educators use increases with the number of special education courses taken and the number of hours spent with special educators. In addition, some general educators may not have a positive attitude toward including students with disabilities in their classrooms. Discussion of these findings and implications for training are provided.

Students With Learning Disabilities

“…A total of eight studies were located through this procedure for inclusion in this synthesis (DeBettencourt, 1999;DeSimone & Parmar, 2006;Fletcher, Bos, & Johnson, 1999;Leyser & Tappendorf, 2001;Maccini & Gagnon, 2006;Minke, Bear, Deemer, & Griffin, 1996;van Hover & Yeagar, 2003;Vaughn, Reiss, Rothlein, & Hughes, 1999). Findings were consistent with the previous synthesis (Scott et al, 1998) and revealed that teachers perceived the majority of instructional adaptations to be highly desirable and somewhat feasible, but reported being only fairly confident, prepared, and supported to implement instructional adaptations in their classroom.…”

The attitudes of primary school teachers toward inclusive education in rural and urban China

“…Villa and Thousand (2000) claimed that inclusion is first an attitude, a value and belief system instead of an action. This statement was confirmed by a huge number of attitudinal studies (e.g., Coutinho and Repp, 1999;Debettencourt, 1999;Salend, 1998;Salisbury, 2006;Siperstein, Bardon and Widaman, 2007) revealing that positive attitudes of key school personnel are seen as critical prerequisites for successful inclusion. However, research results have also shown that attitudes of these personnel have often been differential or sometimes contradictory, and have often been selected by both proponents and opponents to support or oppose the inclusion movement (Padeliadu and Lampropoulou, 1997).…”

Attitudes towards inclusion: the case of Israeli and Palestinian regular and special education teachers

“…Studies indicated that the key for forming positive attitudes among teachers lies in training them to work with such pupils (Hasazi et al , 1994;Debetterncourt, 1999;Avramidis, 2000;Avramidis et al , 2000). Allport et al (1960) found that emotional and behavioural changes among social workers, nurses and teachers were achieved when information about disabilities was provided (the cognitive component of attitudes), in addition to practical experience (the behavioural component).…”