Attitudes of Teachers and Students towards Mainstreaming

Mainstreaming, in education is a practice of teaching handicapped children in regular class rooms with non handicapped children to the fullest extent possible. Such children may have orthopedic, intellectual, emotional, or visual difficulties or handicaps associated with hearing or learning. The practice is also called inclusion. Mainstreaming has been of increasing interest since the late 1960s in response to researches showing that many handicapped students learned better in regular than in special classes. The aim of present study is to assess the attitudes toward mainstreaming in which the sample of the study consisted of 100 teachers (50 Special Education Teachers and 50 Regular Class Teachers) and 79 students (29 disabled and 50 normal students). Mainstreaming Attitude Scale (Likert- type) was used as a tool of data collection and ANOVA method was applied for analysis. The obtained results were discussed in view of existing literature and the study was concluded with recommendations for further research on the subject.