The investigation of elementary school teachers' emotions, attitudes, and concerns about inclusive education in Amasya

Based on the rule of providing equal rights and opportunities to all people, special needs individuals should be granted same rights and opportunities. Equal educational right and opportunity for the individuals with special needs is an increasingly widespread idea that can be accomplished through inclusive education which is applied among their peers and their own natural environment. Teachers are the most effective factor on inclusive education. Teachers' attitudes, concerns, and emotions towards inclusive education guide students' behavior and emotions. The purpose of this study is to investigate elementary school teachers' emotions, attitudes, and concerns about inclusive education in terms of different variables such as gender, age, education level, having meaningful interaction with the special needs individual, having education on inclusive education, having knowledge about local legislation and politics related to special education, having self-confidence on providing education to special needs individuals, and having experience on inclusive education. The study group of this study consists of 502 teachers who have been working at different public schools dependent to the Directorate of National Education in Amasya in 2015-2016 academic years. This study has been conducted by screening model. Because of trying to reach the whole universe (teachers), no attempt was made to establish a sample group in this study. The data has been collected by survey technique. In order to collect data, the researchers have used The Sentiments, Attitudes, and Concerns about Inclusive Education Scale Revised (SACIE-R). This scale has two subdivisions. First one is about Personal Information Form and second one includes some statements about teachers' emotions, attitudes, and concerns about inclusive education. All collected data has been analyzed by SPSS 20.0 program. Parametric analysis techniques and independent group t test were used for distributions showing normal distribution characteristics and significance was determined at .05 level. After analyzing the collected data, the researcher has come to know that there is a significant relationship between teachers' concerns about inclusive education and gender variable. Furthermore, the researcher has found that there is not any significant relationship between teachers' emotions, attitudes, and concerns about inclusive education and age variable. Teachers' emotions and concerns about inclusive education change according to their education level. The researcher has also found that there is a significant relationship between teachers' concerns about inclusive education and having meaningful interaction with the special needs individual variable. Moreover, there is a significant relationship between teachers' concerns and attitudes about inclusive education and getting special education. It is found that there is a significant relationship between teachers' emotions and concerns on inclusive education and having knowledge about local legislation and politics related to special education variable. The researcher has furthermore found that there is a significant relationship between teachers' emotions, attitudes, and concerns on inclusive education and having self-confidence on providing education to special needs individuals variable, The researcher has found that there is a significant relationship between teachers' emotions, attitudes, and concerns on inclusive education and experience variable. Finally, the researcher has found that there is a significant relationship between teachers' attitudes, and concerns on inclusive education and branch variable.