Teachers’ Attitude towards Special Need Students in Secondary Schools in North Senatorial District of Edo State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated attitude towards special need students (SNS) among teachers in public secondary schools in Edo Central Senatorial District. The study was undertaken to determine the teachers’ attitude and the influence of gender, educational specialisation and experience on their attitude towards SNS. A total of 369 (50%) of the 739 teachers were drawn in the district by proportionate to size sampling. However, 351 questionnaires were recovered and used for analysis. The instrument used was a researcher developed questionnaire titled “Teachers’ Attitude towards Special Needs Students Questionnaire-TATSNSQ” with a test-retest reliability alpha of 0.79 was used to collect data from teachers. Mean ( ) and standard deviations (S.D) were used to analyze the research question while Mann-Whitney and Kruskall-Wallis test was used to test the hypotheses. Findings showed that attitude towards SNS among secondary school teachers in the study area were negatively skewed. The test of hypotheses showed that their attitude does not differ by sex (U_cal. 15000.50; p>0.05) but differ significantly by their educational specialisation (U_cal. 7633.50; p<0.05) and years of experience (H-value 24.270; p<0.05). It was recommended that the Edo State government needs to establish special education schools for special need students in the state.

Keywords: Attitude, Special Need Students, Inclusive Education, Educational Management