Research On Pre-service Teachers’ Explicit And Implicit Attitudes Towards Autistic Children

Although some social groups claim that they have a positive explicit attitude towards autistic children,research shows that they may all have some forms of negative implicit attitude towards autistic children,especially when they show challenging behavior.There is a certain relationship between attitude and behavior,and attitude can predict its influence on teachers’ behavior decision-making and educational practice of autistic children.It is therefore important to understand the attitude of pre-service teachers in order to create a more inclusive educational environment.Therefore,in order to create a more inclusive educational environment,it is very important to understand the attitude of pre-service teachers.Through the review of the existing implicit attitude research in the field of special education in China,it is found that the research on the explicit and implicit attitude of pre-service teachers towards autistic children is almost in a blank state.This study first revised the social attitudes towards autism scale(SAAS)in Chinese in order to provide an effective tool for the investigation of explicit attitude towards autism,and then investigated the explicit attitude of autistic children among790 pre-service teachers by using the Chinese version of SAAS.Given that factors such as social expectation and sensitivity may influence the validity of explicit attitude,simply asking someone publicly about their attitudes or biases does not provide very accurate information.Then,an implicit association test(IAT)on vocabulary and pictures of autistic children was developed to evaluate the implicit attitude of pre-service teachers towards autistic children.Therefore,in addition to using self-reported explicit scale to measure explicit attitude,216 pre-service teachers were required to complete vocabulary IAT and picture IAT at the same time to investigate their implicit attitude towards autistic children by indirect measurement.Secondly,in the measurement of explicit and implicit attitudes,the effects of pre-service teachers’ basic demographic information,learning experience in autism curriculum,contact experience and social desirability on attitude were examined,whether these factors can significantly predict pre-service teachers’ explicit and implicit attitudes towards children with autism.Finally,through the analysis of the results,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)The revised Chinese version of SAAS shows good reliability and validity,which shows that can be used as an effective tool to investigate the explicit attitude of autistic children;(2)Pre-service teachers have a moderately positive explicit attitude towards autistic children and a negative implicit attitude towards autistic children;In addition,due to the difference of stimulus materials in the experiment,the negative degree of implicit attitude on picture IAT is lower than that of vocabulary;(3)There is no significant correlation between explicit and implicit attitudes of pre-service teachers toward autistic children,which supports the dual attitude model proposed by Wilson and Lindsey;(4)The major,grade,learning experience of autism curriculum and contact experience have significant effects on the explicit and implicit attitudes of pre-service teachers.Social desirability has a significant effect on pre-service teachers’ explicit attitude toward autistic children,but not on implicit attitude.In addition,pre-service teachers’ implicit attitude toward autistic children also differ in gender variables,no correlation was found in explicit attitude.Finally,combined with the research discussion and conclusion,from the aspects of cognitive training of pre-service teachers(the opening of courses)and contact experience(increasing contact opportunities and improving contact quality),this paper puts forward some educational suggestions and research prospects for the change of pre-service teachers’ negative implicit attitude towards autistic children.The future direction of the research should be more focus on the expansion of the scope of research object under different cultural background,the empirical intervention of attitude change and science popularization of "autism intervention view" and so on.