Special Needs Students

The purpose of this study is to develop a broad and comprehensive investigation of the inclusion of special needs students in regular classrooms in public schools. Inclusion has been, and continues to be, a hotly debated area in education. Until fairly recently, much of this debate has focused on the ethical issues or social benefits of inclusion. Recently, however, the research is turning toward the efficacy of the process. There are efforts to develop, implement, and share effective administrative, instructional, and assessment strategies that support inclusive environments. What is not present is an effort to asses the effects of inclusion policies on the great majority of the students who do not have special needs, but whose legitimate educational needs may be compromised by inclusion.

The movement for the inclusion of special needs students in general classrooms has been reinforced since the 1970s by (a) litigation and (b) laws (e.g., the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990, in particular). While the federal laws do not require the full inclusion of special needs students in general classrooms, pressure groups, educational theorists, educational psychologists, school administrators, and others have continually pushed toward the full inclusion of special needs stud

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ub-themes then were identified and analyzed qualitatively. The most serious methodological limitation of this research was that the sample selection and size provided no means of determining the generalizability of the study findings. As a consequence, the research results must be regarded as primarily anecdotal in character. Bender, Vail, and Scott (1995, pp. 87-94, 120) compared the instructional strategies used by general education teachers with favorable attitudes toward mainstreaming to the strategies used by teachers with less favorable attitudes toward the inclusions of severely handicapped students in general education classes. The ultimate goal of the research was the identification of correlations between teacher background or class variation and mainstreaming attitudes. Quantitative procedures, thus, were employed in the conduct of what essentially was descriptive research. The researchers were seeking clues to strategies to apply in efforts to change teacher attitudes toward mainstreaming. The research sample was selected from the population of teachers in grades one through eight in 11 schools in three school districts located in northeastern Georgia (Bender, Vail, & Scott, 1995, p. 88). Teachers were selected
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 8499
Approximate Pages = 34 (250 words per page)

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