As the tendency of recent integrated education, the importance of non-disabled children's proper understanding of children with disabilities has been emphasized. For effective integrated education, it would be a prerequisite to successful integrated e...
As the tendency of recent integrated education, the importance of non-disabled children's proper understanding of children with disabilities has been emphasized. For effective integrated education, it would be a prerequisite to successful integrated education that non-disabled children accepted disabilities not as a discrimination but as a difference and helped disabled children form positive interactions.
By accepting such educational demand, various researches on educational programs for the understanding of disabilities have been performed. However, there has been a lack of the researches on education for the understanding of disabilities for assistive technology and most of them have been based on the operation of programs by the directed guidance of teachers.
In this regard, the purpose of this study was to contrive and use a program of improving the recognition of disabled people where non-disabled children could actively participate based on the assistive technology for the understanding of disabilities, to investigate whether it would have a positive effect on the attitudes of non-disabled children towards disabilities and to give assistance to teachers in actual classrooms by arranging data for their execution of education for non-disabled children's understanding disabilities.
The subjects of study included two classes of 5th-grade students from B Elementary School located in Seoul Metropolitan City and it was an experimental research divided by an experimental group and a control group.
The researcher conducted education about assistive technology for the understanding of disabilities in the experimental group and general education for the understanding of disabilities 10 times in total for the duration of five weeks in the control group.
One week after conducting education about assistive technology for the understanding of disabilities, the study measured the acceptance attitudes towards cognitive, emotional and behavioral disabilities through the acceptance scale for disabilities and t-test was conducted for the findings using an SPSS.
The results of this study could be summarized as below. The experimental group that conducted education about assistive technology for the understanding of disabilities had a more positive effect on non-disabled children's attitudes towards disabled children than the control group that performed general education for the understanding of disabilities. When comparing the results of the pre-test and post-test of acceptance scale, there were positive changes in all three areas of cognitive, emotional and behavioral attitudes as well as overall acceptance attitudes. In addition, there were positive expressions that gave supports for disabled children in expressive languages shown in the impression reports after completing the program and that it was possible for them to understand disability and assistive technology.
The results suggested that the attitudes of non-disabled children towards disabled children could be changed positively when an appropriate program was provided before the integration of disabled and non-disabled children, the former could naturally understand and accept disabilities in the process of surveying the topic of assistive technology and the program would be appropriate to learning concrete methods that could help disabled children.
However, in order for the effects to be sustainable after the treatment of the program, it would be necessary to develop activity programs that could directly exchange positive interactions between non-disabled and disabled children and to variously develop moving images or programs that could provide practical assistance by improving the content of assistive technology that has been offered in a limited manner in current educational curriculum.