Assessment and interpretation of teachers’ attitudes towards students with disabilities / Evaluación e interpretación de la actitud del profesorado hacia alumnos con discapacidad

Abstract

The process of including students with disabilities is necessarily influenced by teachers' attitudes towards them and towards their inclusion in education. After detecting the need to study the attitudes present in preschool and primary and secondary school teachers, this study was proposed as it was decided that an analysis of such attitudes could help to develop a better understanding of the current needs of the education system. This study analysed data on attitudes from a total of 175 teachers (29.10% male) working in state schools (50.30%) and semi-private schools in different autonomous communities of the Spanish state. An adapted version of the teacher questionnaire on attitudes towards students with special educational needs arising from disability was used. After analysing the psychometric properties of the questionnaire, further purification of these properties resulted in an assessment instrument comprising 22 items. It is worth highlighting the appraisal that teachers carry out of their training, the existence of resources, as well as their own level of involvement.

Teachers’ Attitudes toward Educational Inclusion in Spain: A Systematic Review

“…Of the eighteen studies that analyzed the influence of gender, seven found that women tend to be more positive [20][21][22][23][24][25][26] and four found that men have better attitudes [27][28][29][30].…”

“…Regarding teaching experience, 10 studies analyzed its influence (see Tables 1 and 4): three found that teaching experience has a positive correlation with positive attitudes toward inclusion [27,28,31], three found the opposite [26,29,32], and the rest did not find a statistically significant relation [33][34][35][36].…”

“…Concerning the educational stage, seven studies detected less favorable attitudes toward inclusion in secondary education than in primary education teachers [25,29,30,[33][34][35]41]. At the same time, early childhood teachers' attitudes seem to be more positive than primary education teachers' attitudes [25,33,35,42].…”

Attention to Diversity in Compulsory Secondary Education

“…Likewise, the a posteriori analysis (Scheffé test) showed a higher use of measures to attend to diversity in teachers with less experience, a doctorate degree, and who developed their work in provinces with a low number of inhabitants. In that sense, it is important to highlight the importance of beliefs and attitudes that teachers had on diversity, which is not put into practice for the inclusive educational activities in Secondary Education Schools [31][32][33][34].…”

Learning Difficulties for Retarded Students: Case Studies on Biology Subjects in High School

“…Intellectual disability in mentally retarded students makes it hampered in activities, including when studying [13]. According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA) [14], Mental retardation is classified into four: first, mild (IQ <70) in this category students are able to be educated, trained and can take care of themselves, secondly, moderate (IQ 35-50), students can be educated and trained but physical abnormalities have emerged as innate, third, Severe (IQ 20-35), students need guarding because they cannot take care of themselves, fourth, profound (IQ> 20) has serious disabilities, both physical and intelligence.…”