Promoting Inclusion for Students with Disabilities:

1. Promoting Inclusion for Students with Disabilities: Building Teacher Confidence and Understanding Ting-Wen Chen and Jennifer Wilson with Kathy Seifert and Susan Hupp Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota Results Research Questions What is the degree to which preservice general education teachers will increase their awareness and confidence in working with students with special needs? What is the extent to which the preservice general education teachers will be better able to identify types of disability by their characteristics and be better able to make appropriate and sophisticated adaptations for students with disabilities? Justification Increasing numbers of students with disabilities are being placed in regular education classrooms, and “adaptation” is identified as one of the critical elements to promote successful inclusion (Cross et al., 2004). However, general educators often feel inadequate in meeting the needs of students with disabilities by adapting their instructions (Leatherman, 2007). A special education foundation course is designed with a focus on characteristics of students with disabilities and possible adaptations for meeting their needs. If pre-service general education teachers master the knowledge taught in the special education foundation course, they should be able to organize, retrieve, and generalize the information to adapt their instructions for students with disabilities (Bransford, 2000) . The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of a special education foundations course offered to pre-service general education teachers on the teaching of students with disabilities. • Methods • Participants • A pre- and post-survey was administered to 169 pre-service general education • teachers enrolled in a special education foundations course. • Procedures • Participants were asked to complete three tasks after providing demographic information • Task 1: Rate personal levels of awareness and confidence in teaching students with disabilities in their classrooms • Task 2: Answer questions related to recognizing the characteristics of high incidence disabilities • Task 3: Make appropriate adaptations in the classroom to ensure student success • (The analysis of task 3 is accomplished for 83 participants.) Implications and Future Use Results of this study support the practice of designing instruction regarding characteristics of students with disabilities and adaptations that can meet their needs. Participants increased their level of self-awareness and self-confidence, gained more understanding of the characteristics of students with disabilities, and made more adaptations to the instructions. Moreover, the survey developed in this study can be used to evaluate student growth over the semester and inform instructional decisions in adjusting course content and instructional methods. A clearly defined coding system is also invented and has the potential to be used as a universal measure for examining open-ended responses. Last, the current study determined a research-based method aimed at measuring growth in knowledge that can help justify the exigent need to provide regular education pre-service teachers courses in working with special education issues.