Abstract

The purpose of this research is to measure the teachers’ awareness of, and attitudes towards children with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS, hereafter). The main intention was to sample primary school teachers; however time constraints dictated that the 30 teachers (male and female), who participated in this study, were postgraduate students and teaching staff. The instrument used in this study was a questionnaire that consisted of 34 items; 15 on attitude and 15 on knowledge. The independent variables were gender, age and experience of teaching children with Special Educational Needs; the dependent variables were knowledge of and attitude towards children with AS. The responses were subjected to a range of tests which, in the first place, showed there were some problems with the design of the questionnaire, also that responses were not a normal distribution, so the chosen tests were non-parametric, mainly Mann-Whitney U test. Very few differences in knowledge or attitude were found among the different groups of teachers. No significant differences in either knowledge or attitude were found in age or gender. The one interesting finding was that whilst teachers with experience of teaching children with Special Educational Needs (SEN, hereafter) had more knowledge, they were no more likely to have positive attitudes than others.

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