Attitudes of Primary School Teachers towards Inclusive Education

Authors : Özcan Palavan, Volkan Çiçek, Bayram Ali Yıldırım

Pages : 49-63

View : 25 | Download : 8

Publication Date : 2018-01-25

Article Type : Research

Abstract :The objective of the research is to analyze the attitudes of classroom teachers towards inclusion education in the consideration of certain variables. 500 teachers working in different primary schools in Gaziantep have joined in the study. A scale of attitudes towards inclusion, consisting of 40 questions and 5 sub-dimensions that was formed by researchers as a data instrument was applied in the present work. It's identified at the end-of research that the points attained by the teachers in the research from some sub-dimensions of the scale of attitutes towards inclusion reflect statistically meaningful difference according to gender, age group, length of service, marital status. As a result, it's to be remarked that teachers’ attitudes towards inclusion give out diffence according to some variables and certain sub-dimensions oriented to inclusion don't indicate difference depending on diverse variables. The outcome of this study reveales that not only the teachers' length of service, but also the duration that the teachers have dealt with inclusive education is related to their attitude towards inclusive education. However, there are also other research findings in the literature, which reveal that the teachers' length of service does not affect their ideas towards inclusive education. Following suggestions may be made in the light of these findings: Students involved in the inclusive education may be assigned to the classes of married teachers. It may be useful for classroom teachers, who are in the first five years of their professional career especially, not to be directly responsible for students of inclusive education.
Keywords : inclusive education, students with disabilities, disabled students, teachers’ attitudes, teachers’ perspectives