Attitudes of Italian Teachers and Parents toward School Inclusion of Students with Mental Retardation: The Role of Experience

By G. Balboni, Luigi Pedrabissi. Education and Training in Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, 2000

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Variables influencing the attitude of 678 teachers and 647 parents of students without disabilities toward the inclusion of students with mental retardation (MR) in ordinary classes were investigated. The attitude was measured via an adhoc questionnaire on the different aspects of inclusion. The results indicated that special education teachers were the most favorable, that school teachers with inclusion experience had a more positive attitude and, compared with teachers without such experience, were not negatively affected by age and years of service. Among parents, the most favorable were those whose children had had students with MR in their classes. It further emerged that parents with average-to-high socio-economic status and mothers were more in favor, whereas high school teachers and teachers older than 40 were less favorable and advocated greater training. The importance of experience, information, and adequate training to prevent and resolve inclusion problems is underlined.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bd11caf726556eeacf925b85a4b03d71b65cf52

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluating Inclusion: an examination of parent views and factors influencing their perspectives (2004, background): “Other studies on parents of children with disabilities in the United States (Stoiber et al., 1998) and of parents of students without disabilities in Italy (Balboni & Pedrabissi, 2000) reported more favourable attitudes toward inclusion by parents of higher socioeconomic levels.”
The psychometric evaluation of a questionnaire to measure attitudes towards inclusive education (2012, result): “As shown in other attitude studies (Avramidis and Kalyva 2007; Balboni and Pedrabissi 2000; Siperstein et al. 2007), experience with children with SEN is found to be a variable, which positively influences people’s attitudes.”
Public awareness, attitudes and beliefs regarding intellectual disability: a systematic review. (2011, background): “Research focused on children or professionals providing services to them, such as teachers, was excluded (e.g. Balboni & Pedrabissi, 2000; Lifschitz & Glaubman, 2002).”
Attitudes of parents towards inclusive education: a review of the literature (2010, background): “The study of Balboni and Pedrabissi (2000) investigated the attitudes parents held toward the inclusion of children with cognitive disabilities in regular education (N=647).”
Student Teachers' Attitudes Towards the Inclusion of Children with Special Needs (2003, result): “…results are mixed in that several studies have found that inclusion of children at lower grades in the school system is viewed more positively (Scruggs & Mastropieri, 1996), but some others have suggested that teachers working with older children are more positive (Balboni & Pedrabissi, 2000).”
Regular primary schoolteachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education: a review of the literature (2011, result): “The latter is supported by other studies (Avramidis and Norwich 2002; Balboni and Pedrabissi 2000; Leyser et al. 1994).”
Exploring inclusion preservice training needs: a study of variables associated with attitudes and self‐efficacy beliefs (2006, background): “…where special education teachers have more accepting attitudes compared to general educators (Forlin et al., 1996; Taylor et al., 1997; Balboni & Pedrabissi, 2000), but Romi and Daniel (2001) reported that general education and special education preservice teachers did not express…”
Which variables relate to the attitudes of teachers, parents and peers towards students with special educational needs in regular education? (2012, background): “Besides the influence of the SEN type on attitudes, several other variables have been related to attitudes, like age of parents (Balboni and Pedrabissi 2000), gender of peers (Nowicki 2006; Opdal, Wormnaes, and Habayeb 2001; Siperstein et al. 2007) and teacher training (Batsiou et al. 2008).”