Examination of Physical Education Teachers’ Feelings, Attitudes and Perceptions Towards Integration/Inclusion of Autistic Students

Abstract

Aim: The aim of this study was to examine the feelings, attitudes and perceptions of physical education teachers towards inclusion and integration of autistic students. Material and Methods: The research sample was composed of physical education teachers who taught at private and state schools affiliated to Edirne Provincial National Education Directorate. To obtain the research data, a “Personal Information Form” developed by the researcher, and the fourth part of the “Placement and Services Survey” (PASS) developed by Segall (2011) for inclusion and integration of students with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and adapted to Turkish by Ahmetoğlu et al. (2017), namely, the “Scale of Attitudes, Feelings and Perceptions towards Inclusion/Integration of Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder”, were used. In the study, the data obtained by means of the questionnaire were analyzed and evaluated using SPSS 17 software. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests were used to investigate the normal distribution of variables. 0.05 was used as the level of significance when interpreting the results. For examining differences between the participant groups in the study, the independent samples t-test was utilized when variables were normally distributed. In the test results, when p values obtained for the related variables were greater than 0.05, data were assumed to be normally distributed, whereas when p values were less than 0.05, data were assumed not to be normally distributed. Findings: A statistically significant difference was found in mean scale scores depending on whether or not the physical education teachers had worked with children requiring special education during their years of service (p