The correlation between primary school students' attitudes towards inclusive students and their empathic tendency levels (Example of the province Kocaeli)

The main purpose of this research is to determine the correlation between the attitudes of normal primary school students towards inclusive students and their empathic tendency levels. The research is in relational screening model and it has a descriptive character. The population of the research consisted of third and fourth grade primary school students in Kocaeli province in 2018-2019 academic year. The research sample consisted of 831 students (439 male, 392 female) studying in the third and fourth grades of 8 different schools which were randomly selected from Körfez, Kartepe and İzmit districts. On the purpose of determining the attitudes of the normal students towards the students with special needs, "Etkinlik Tercih Formu" developed by Siperstein (1980) and adapted into Turkish by Çiftci (1997) and On the purpose of determining their emphatic tendency levels, "KA-Sİ Çocuklar İçin Empatik Eğilim Ölçeği" developed by Kaya and Siyez (2010) was used in the research. SPSS 20.0 packaged software was used to analyze the data. Because of the number of data is more than 30, the result of Kolmogorov-Simirnov (Lilliefors) test was analysed and it has been found that the data are not suitable for normal distribution because the significance values of the scale data are less than 0.05 for the variables (gender, class, school type and inclusion student status) and the skewness and kurtosis coefficients are outside the ± 1 limits. Since the scores on the variables were not normally distributed, Mann-Whitney U Test was used for nonparametric tests and Spearman coefficient value was used for regression analysis and relationship test. The research results has shown that, there is an intermediate, positive and significant correlation between the attitudes of the normal students towards the inclusive students and their empathic tendency levels. Cognitive and emotional empathy variables are the predictors of normal students' attitudes towards inclusive students. It has been concluded that the 3rd and 4th-grade students have positive attitudes towards inclusive students and female students' attitudes are higher than male students. It has been found that, the attitudes of public school students and private school students towards inclusive students are similar, and the attitudes of students with and without an inclusive student in their classrooms are not different. It can be said that, the empathic tendency levels of the 3rd and 4th grade students are high; also, the 4th grade students has higher cognitive and emotional empathy levels than the 3rd grade students. It was found that only the cognitive empathic levels of the students of private schools were significantly higher than the students of public schools. It has been found that the emphatic levels of students with and without an inclusive student in their classrooms are similar. Also, it can be said that 24% of the students' attitudes towards mainstreaming students stem from their empathic tendency levels.