Attitudes of students with typical development towards students with disabilities

Abstract

Inclusion is a long process that needs to constantly evolve and upgrades. Personal attitudes, behavior, and professionalism of the teachers and the professional team are vital in the process of inclusion. But certainly very important factor are attitudes of students with typical development. Methodology: The aim of the research is to examine how children with typical development are willing to accept (inclusion) of students with disabilities. Main tasks of the research are: to determine the opinions of students with typical development in terms of social interaction with children with disabilities, to determine whether children with typical development bias against students with disabilities because they are in their class and to identify the opinions of students with typical development in terms of whether students with disabilities can learn like them. To process the information comparative method and the method of descriptive analysis were used. The data were obtained using a questionnaire "Questionnaire to measure the attitudes of students with typical development to students with special needs" (Gash, 1993); this questionnaire was translated and adapted into Macedonian. Results: The study included 333 students with typical development, from 4 regular schools in 4 municipalities in the territory of the Republic Macedonia who started the process of inclusion. The majority of respondents agreed that children with disabilities should be included in mainstream schools (55%) and that students with disabilities can learn mathematics (70.57%) and read the same books (61.56 %) like them. Conclusions: According to the results, we can conclude that children with typical development have positive attitudes towards children with disabilities.