The Social Face of Inclusive Education
The quest for inclusion in the general education classroom has become a major movement in the public school systems today. The goal of educators is to create the least restrictive environment for students, and to give each student an equal opportunity to learn has become a main focus of educators today. The benefits of inclusion may be by improving student's academic success, and by also improving their social skills. In this article on the research on inclusion it explores how students with learning disabilities are affected socially in the regular classroom. It looks at how these students are accepted and how they feel about themselves. The study reveals some new ideas on inclusion, and brings old ideologies back to the surface. The study, done on the effects of inclusion in the regular classroom focused on perceived loneliness, social competence, and social status of students with learning disabilities in an inclusion classroom. The students with learning disabilities had to spend 100% of the school day in a regular education classroom to be classified as an inclusion classroom. The classes that were used in the survey were located in four sixth grade classrooms in Ohio. "It was hypothesized that inclusive education
There were sixty-eight students without disabilities in the survey, and fifteen students had some type of learning disability in reading, writing, or math. The results of the study showed that these students with learning disabilities struggle socially in the inclusive classroom setting. I know that these students struggle academically due to their disabilities, and they are place in these setting to help them learn. The first is called the Modified Children's Loneliness Scale (Lutfig, 1986), and the second is known as the Peer Nomination Inventory (Lutfig, 1986). I may not be very outgoing in a physics class because I struggle in that area, but I may be just the opposite in a history class were I feel confident. Is it due to the fact that they struggle academically, or may be it is because there is no interaction in the classroom. By creating the least restrictive environment we need to analyze why these students struggle socially. This not only creates interaction, but it also allows these students who may be lonely to work along side a fellow classmate, and maybe just maybe establish a friendship that will lift their confidence. I believe that it will give them a different perspective on an inclusive setting. " (pp 3) Students who participated in the survey had to meet Ohio state requirements for being learning disabled, and they had to spend their entire day participating in a regular education classroom. Now I am not sure how these classroom were run, but I believe it as responsibility as educators to create as much interaction as possible in our classroom settings. This may cause me to feel isolated in a subject that I may struggle with. I think that this holds true for students with learning disabilities in inclusive classroom. The students ranged from ten to thirteen years of age, and of the sixty-eight students there were thirty-six boy and thirty-two girls. "The Peer Nomination Inventory formed two scales: "liked most" (popularity scale) and "liked least" (unpopularity scale) that were used to generate social impact and social preference scores.
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