Secondary teacher attitudes toward the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in the general mathematics classroom.

摘要

The primary focus of this study was to examine the attitudes of the secondary mathematics teachers toward the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in the general mathematics classroom. Specifically, this study was concerned with the influence of selected demographic variables and school variables on the attitudes of secondary mathematics teachers regarding the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in the general mathematics classroom.;A survey research design was employed in the study. One hundred fifteen (115) secondary mathematics teachers employed in the southern region of Texas were selected to participate in the study. The data analysis for this study was divided into two major sections. The first section consisted of the demographic profile of the participants in the study. The second portion of the instrument examined the hypotheses formulated in this study. The instrument was found to have excellent content validity with split half reliability coefficient of .82 for the test as a whole. The One-Way Analysis of Variance and the Scheffe' Post Hoc Test were used to test the hypotheses. One of the most interesting findings of the current study was the influence of gender on the attitudes of secondary mathematics teachers toward the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in general mathematics classrooms. Specifically, male and female secondary mathematics teachers exhibited similar attitudes toward the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in general mathematics classrooms. The present findings were consistent with the work of Jeon (2003). Jeon found that a personal variable, such as gender, by itself, was not a significant predictor of teachers' attitudes toward the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in general mathematics classrooms.;Another notable finding of this study was the significant influence of the variable years of teaching experience on the attitudes of secondary mathematics regarding the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in general mathematics classrooms. To be sure, the more years of experience teachers have the more favorable their attitudes were regarding the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in general mathematic classrooms. These findings were favorable to those by Brown (2007) and Berry (2010). Both of these researchers found that years of teaching experience did produce a significant effect on teachers' attitudes toward the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in mathematics classrooms.;Finally the variables ethnicity and socioeconomic status had no influence on the attitudes of secondary mathematics teachers regarding the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in the classroom. An explanation for these findings might be that individually these variables might have little impact on teachers' attitudes but combined with other social, academic and psychological factors could be significant predictors of the attitudes of teachers toward the inclusive classroom.