Article

Promoting Acceptance toward Children with Disabilities in Inclusive Preschool Settings: Developing an Intervention Program and its Effects

Author

장수연,정옥분

Information

pp. 163~195 / 2012 Vol.19 No.1

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop an intervention program that promotes acceptance toward children withdisabilities and to then test its effects in an inclusive preschool setting. The goal of the intervention program was topromote the acceptance by young children of those of disabilities in inclusive preschool settings while providinginformation and direct as well as indirect experience regarding disabilities. The intervention program consisted of 32sessions and included the following components: indirect experiences (story-time/discussion about children withdisabilities), and direct experiences (structured play with children with disabilities/disability-simulation activities). Theparticipants were 31 children enrolled in a preschool class that included a classmate with a disability in Daejeon-, acity in South Korea. All of the children participated in all of the sessions of the intervention. About 20-30 minutesessions were held four times a week for a total of 8 weeks. Students also took a pretest, a posttest, and afollow-up test. The interview method utilized for this study was the Picture Sociometric Technique (McCandless &Marshall, 1957) and this was used alongside sociometric assessment tools to evaluate the children's attitudes towardtheir aforementioned classmate. Classroom observations during free play sessions were analyzed using the Code forActive Student Participation and Engagement-Revised: CASPER-Ⅲ(Tsao, Odom, & Brown, 2001). This served torecord the frequency of the children's positive and negative social behaviors toward their disabled classmate. The datawere analyzed using a paired sample t test and the Wilcoxon matched pairs signed-ranks test. The results indicatedthat children had significantly higher scores on measures of acceptance of a classmate with a disability afterparticipating in the intervention program. On the pretest, the children showed low levels of acceptance of aclassmate with a disability on measures of sociometric assessment. On the pretest, they also exhibited low levels ofpositive, and high levels of negative, social behaviors toward a classmate with a disability were exhibited accordingto classroom observations. On the posttest, significant gains in the levels of acceptance were found on measures ofsociometric assessment and in levels of positive social behaviors toward their disabled classmate. In addition, asignificant decrease in the levels of negative social behaviors toward their disabled classmate was also found.Moreover, on the follow-up test, these positive changes were sustained. Therefore, the program appears to be aneffective strategy for promoting the acceptance of individuals with disabilities in inclusive preschool settings.

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