Attitudes toward Inclusive Education among School Teachers: A Comparative Study

Inclusive education in India has recently received a momentum .A willingness on the part of Teachers to support all children in the mainstream classroom; including with special needs is the hallmark of inclusive education. Thus teacher’s attitudes toward inclusive education play a pivotal role in its success. In this way, the present study is an attempt to assess and compare the attitudes of mainstream and special education school teachers towards inclusive education .A purposive sample of 300 regular school teachers consisting of 150 teachers from mainstream and 150 teachers from special schools of Delhi-NCR (Noida, Ghaziabad, Delhi, Faridabad) of both male and female aged 24-45 yrs was drawn for research purpose. Attitudes toward Inclusive Education Scale (ATIES) developed by Wilczenski, F.L (1992), containing 16 items was used to measure their attitudes toward inclusive education. Descriptive and inferential statistics (t-test) were used to assess and compare the attitudes of teachers of mainstream and those of special school. The results indicated that teachers of mainstream school have more favourable attitudes than those of special schools, which may be one of the major causes of slow success of this system in India.