There have been ongoing efforts to promote the active participation of students with disabilities in the lessons of an inclusive class, which are based on the general curriculum, as the need for the curricular inclusion for students with disabilities ...
There have been ongoing efforts to promote the active participation of students with disabilities in the lessons of an inclusive class, which are based on the general curriculum, as the need for the curricular inclusion for students with disabilities have continued to grow. Recent years have also witnessed an increasing need to diagnose and assess "results" as to whether students with disabilities in an inclusive class take meaningful part in the general curriculum. The whole accountability lies in the hands of the field teachers. Thus an instructional rubric has been suggested as a means of meeting the instructional needs of individual students with disabilities and including them in the process of diagnosis and assessment along with the students of an inclusive class.
As a tool for instruction during class, an instructional rubric has been reported not only to be useful in promoting the class participation of students with disabilities, but also grant benefits to the students of an inclusive class through careful planning. But it's extremely difficult to attain successful inclusion without cooperating with the teacher of an inclusive class who actually gives lectures. Thus this study set out to devise an instructional rubric for the teachers of an inclusive and a special class, encourage them to work with each other throughout the entire intervention process till evaluation, and investigate its impacts academic engagement behaviors of students with disabilities and academic self-efficacy of inclusive class student.
The subjects include three students with disabilities, who were difficult to participate in lessons in an inclusive class at a regular elementary school, and the students of three inclusive classes that contained each of the three students with disabilities. The application of an instructional rubric through teachers cooperation went through four stages, which include giving teacher training, devising an instructional rubric, applying it to class, and evaluating the results after class. The intervention lasted for six weeks.
The experimental procedure applied to the students with disabilities proceeded in the order of baseline, intervention, generalization, and retention. The investigator observed the rates of actions to participate in class by applying partial interval recording for 25 minutes during class. As for the students of the inclusive classes, the experimental procedure followed the order of pre-test, intervention, and post-test. By conducting paired samples t-test with an academic self-efficacy scale, I compared their academic self-efficacy before and after the intervention.
The results can be summarized as follows:
First, academic engagement behaviors of all the three students with disabilities increased after the intervention. The increased academic engagement behaviors were generalized to other subjects. And two of the three students with disabilities maintained the increased academic engagement behaviors after two weeks from the end of the intervention.
And secondly, there were significant differences between the pre- and post-test scores of overall academic self-efficacy among the students of the inclusive classes. The finding indicates that the application of an instructional rubric through teachers cooperation in social studies was effective in improving the academic self-efficacy of the students of the inclusive classes.
In short, the application of an instructional rubric through teachers cooperation had positive impacts on the participation of the students with disabilities in lessons and the academic self-efficacy of the students of the inclusive classes. It's thus estimated that an instructional rubric can be a device to successfully run the curriculum in elementary school for the goal of inclusive education. When two teachers collaborate with each other in planning, applying, and assessing an instructional rubric even before actual class as an inclusive diagnosis and evaluation measure for students with disabilities and also an instructional supporting instrument to facilitate their access to the general curriculum, both students with disabilities and the students of an inclusive class can benefit from it.