Parallel Session Proceedings »
4.4.5 Impact of Inclusion on the Functioning of Students With Special Educational Needs
With the increasing call for inclusive schooling in Lebanon, inclusion stimulates research into educational outcomes of students with and without special needs to draw conclusions on the desirability of this choice based on empirical evidence. The purpose of the study was to compare the impact of inclusion in one of the schools on the socio-emotional and academic functioning of students with special needs to students without special needs meant to be regular as perceived by students themselves. The group of students with SEN included a group of identified gifted students and a group of students with mild to moderate identified learning disabilities. This comparison was possible by investigating which population of the three populations at the school is best served by inclusion from students’ perceptions, which functioning among socio-emotional and academic is fostered by inclusive education for each population, and whether the impact of inclusive education on students’ functioning differed by type of population. The rationale for conducting this study was to compare students’ functioning with and without special needs in the same inclusive school, the call by researchers for studying socio-emotional functioning of students and not only the academic functioning, to understand the context from students’ perspectives, earlier research compared gifted to “typical” regular students and no study was found comparing them, at any level of functioning, to students with disabilities and the limited research on inclusion in our country. The design used in this study was a mixed design where participants (students of 18 inclusive sections from grade 7 to grade 12) answered a questionnaire on student performance to compare the impact of inclusive education on the three functioning areas (social, emotional and academic), and 6 focus groups(3 FG in middle school: one group of gifted, one group of regular and one group of students with learning disabilities and the same for high school) were conducted to describe the practices that affected their functioning which helped identifying the differences in perceptions among the three populations. Both the questionnaire and the interviews were built upon Indicators for Inclusion issued by Education Bureau, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government (2008).