Investigation of the attitudes towards inclusion and observance of duties and responsibilities of primary school teachers in educational practices through inclusion

The aim of this study is to examine the duties and responsibilities of the primary school teachers involved in inclusion education and their attitudes towards inclusion education. For this purpose, the concurrent design, one of the mixed-method designs, was used that allows the use of qualitative and quantitative data together. The research includes primary school teachers working in inclusion education in the central district of Ağrı. For this purpose, 220 primary school teachers who were involved in inclusive education in the 2018-2019 academic year were subjected to an attitude scale consisting of 22 questions and 5 sub-dimensions, while semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 classroom teachers. While content analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data of the research, frequency analysis, Independent Samples T-Test, Mann-Whitney U, One Way-Anova and Kruskal-Wallis Tests were used in the analysis of quantitative data. According to the findings it was found that; i) 18 of the teachers were not involved in the process of identifying inclusive students, ii) 14 of the teachers did not make in-class adaptations; and the adaptations were not varied, iii) 24 of the teachers did not benefit from support education services, iv) 17 of the teachers did not adapt the objectives set in the primary education program, v) the methods and techniques used by 20 of the teachers in the classroom did not vary and did not adapt for the inclusive students, vi) 15 of the teachers did not perform any application to identify and eliminate the educational needs of inclusive students, vii) all teachers applied for expert support and 19 of the teachers used school guidance teacher as expert support, viii) almost all teachers did not make appropriate adaptations during the measurement and evaluation process. Besides, it was found that there was a statistically significant difference between the attitudes of the teachers towards inclusion and the variables of marital status, having a child, age and professional seniority of the teachers.