A Study On The Accepting Attitudes Of 5-6-year-old Typically Developing Preschoolers Toward Preschoolers With Special Needs And Their Interventions

With the advancement of inclusive preschool education,more and more preschoolers with special needs enter regular classes and receive education with typically developing preschoolers together.Promoting typically developing preschoolers’ acceptance of preschoolers with special needs is one of the major goals of inclusive preschool education.Typically developing preschoolers’ accepting attitudes toward preschoolers with special needs are related to the mental health,school adaptation and social adaptation of preschoolers with special needs.It also concerns the typically developing preschoolers’ respect and tolerance for preschoolers with special needs and their acceptance of human difference and diversity.Therefore,typically developing preschoolers’ acceptance of preschoolers with special needs is the basis of social integration.It is also an important guarantee for high quality inclusive preschool education.In order to gain a deep understanding of the typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes toward preschoolers with special needs,and to provide reference for relevant theoretical and practical work,this article takes preschoolers aged 5 to 6 years as subjects,and adopts psychological tests,social measurement techniques,interviews,and experiments to investigate the current status and influencing factors of typically developing preschoolers’ acceptance of preschoolers with special needs.On this basis,this article continues to explore the impact of inclusive education and intervention on the accepting attitudes.The aim of Study 1 is completing a Chinese revision of the Acceptance Scale for Kindergartners-Revised(ASK-R).ASK-R is translated and revised for preschoolers aged five to six in China,and a Chinese version of the ASK-R which is called ASK-CR,is completed.On this basis,the reliability and validity of ASK-CR are measured.The results show that ASK-CR is a reliable and valid instrument which is suitable for assessing 5-6-year-old typically developing preschoolers’ accepting attitudes toward preschoolers with special needs in the context of Chinese culture.In the second and third studies,we investigate the current status and the possible influencing factors of typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes toward hypothetical and real preschoolers with special needs systematically,through the methods of psychological tests,peer assessments,peer nominations,child interviews,and teacher interviews,from the perspectives of the accepting attitudes’ three dimensions,which are called cognition,emotion and behavioral tendency separately.The results show that:(1)The typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes toward hypothetical preschoolers with special needs tend to be negative,and their attitudes toward real preschoolers with special needs are affected by the characteristics of preschoolers with special needs;(2)The typically developing preschoolers’ sexuality,age,aggressiveness,interaction ability,verbal and nonverbal abilities,empathy,personality traits and their experiences with handicapped people will affect their acceptance of preschoolers with special needs;(3)The traits of preschoolers with special needs in appearance,personality,ability,emotion,behavior and their similarity to typically developing preschoolers will affect typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes toward them.Study 4 is about typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes toward preschoolers with special needs before and after the inclusion.By comparing the typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes toward preschoolers with special needs before and after the inclusion,it is investigated whether the inclusive education affects the accepting attitudes or not.The results show that:(1)The inclusion can improve typically developing preschoolers’ positive emotions and behavioral tendencies for hypothetical preschoolers with special needs,but it does not promote their understanding of hypothetical preschoolers with special needs;(2)Before and after the inclusion,the typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes toward real preschoolers with special needs show different trends.The trends are influenced by the characteristics of preschoolers with special needs.Study 5 is an intervention study on the typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes toward preschoolers with special needs.An intervention program is designed and implemented,and the effect of intervention is investigated by comparing the acceptance of typically developing preschoolers in the experimental group and the control group before and after the intervention.The results show that typically developing preschoolers’ attention and understanding of preschoolers with special needs increase significantly through their participation in picture book reading activities and cooperative game activities,and their emotions and behavioral tendencies have also been significantly improved.Through summarizing and analyzing the results of the above studies,this paper has obtained the following conclusions:(1)The typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes toward hypothetical preschoolers with special needs tend to be negative;(2)The typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes toward real preschoolers with special needs are related to the traits of preschoolers with special needs;(3)The preschoolers’ characteristics in ability,emotion and behavior all affect typically developing preschoolers’ acceptance of preschoolers with special needs;(4)Inclusive education can promote typically developing preschoolers’ acceptance of preschoolers with special needs to a certain extent,but the promotion has some limitations and is affected by the characteristics of preschoolers with special needs;(5)Intervention activities can significantly improve typically developing preschoolers’ acceptance of preschoolers with special needs.Based on the above research conclusions,this paper puts forward suggestions from two aspects: strengthening the research on the preschoolers’ accepting attitudes,and improving the support system of inclusive preschool education.