장애이해교육이 일반아동의 장애아동에 대한 태도에 미치는 효과

The Effects of a Disability-awareness Program on Improving the Attitudes of Regular Elementary School Children toward Children with Disabilities

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a disability awareness program on improving the attitudes of regular elementary school children toward those with disabilities. The participants were 40 children in grades from 1 to 3 at two elementary schools in Wando, Chonnam province. A total of 20 children from one school at which the researcher worked was assigned to the experimental group and those from the other school to the control group. Two groups were equivalent in gender and grade level prior to the beginning of the experiment. The disability awareness program addressed ten topics such as the meaning of being different from each other, friends of children with disabilities, great persons with disabilities, living together, understanding friends with disabilities, etc. The researcher implemented the 10-session program from June 8th to July 9th, 2005, two sessions per week for five weeks. The researcher employed a variety of instructional strategies such as lecture, discussion, internet search, videotape materials, reading relevant stories. The attitudes of the participants toward children with disabilities were measured using Voeltz s (1980) Acceptance Scale and the Adjective Scale with four subscales such as Emotion, Physical Attractiveness, Learning Behavior, and Social Behavior. Their attitudes were measured one week before and after the implementation of the program. T-tests on the pretest-posttest difference scores found that the experimental group showed significantly greater changes in attitudes toward children with disabilities than did the control group. These results implied the that the implementation of disability-awareness programs in regular elementary schools could positively change the attitudes of elementary children toward disability.