Student Perspectives on Inclusive Education: A Survey of Grade 3-6 Children in Rural Alberta, Canada.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper, one of a series, reports the results of a survey of 413 children in Grades Three to Six on inclusive education in a school district in rural Alberta, Canada. The aims of the study were to examine the views of children regarding their experience in schools claiming to be inclusive, situated within a jurisdiction which also claims to be inclusive, and to try and identify any demographic differences in responses. The study found that the school district under examination was generally doing a good job of inclusion in the eyes of the students, and that there were little differences in this view between groups of children identified with exceptionality, and those who were not. Future areas of study include the addition of a qualitative aspect to the examination of student views. Introduction This paper is one of a series outlining the results of survey research conducted in the Pembina Hills Regional School Division #7 (PHRD) in Alberta, Canada (see also Loreman, Lupart, McGhie-Richmond, & Barber, 2008a; Loreman, Lupart, McGhie-Richmond, & Barber, 2008b; Loreman, McGhie-Richmond, Barber & Lupart, 2008). This survey research, conducted in November of 2007, formed part of a larger 3-year examination of inclusive education in PHRD, and involved various stakeholder groups including parents, teachers, school administrators, program assistants (sometimes known as teacher assistants), and students. The results of the surveys for each stakeholder group will be presented in subsequent papers. This paper reports the findings of the survey conducted with children in Grade Three to Six, with results for the two other groups of students (those in Grades 1 and 2, and those in Grades 7-12) being reported in other papers in this series. Inclusive education involves schools and classrooms adapting the ways in which they work to ensure all students are educated together in common contexts, and are treated equitably (Andrews & Lupart, 2000; Loreman, 1999). Despite a considerable amount of research (especially over the past 10 years) demonstrating the efficacy of inclusive education (Loreman, 2007), and longstanding international support for the practice from bodies such as UNESCO (1994), movement towards adopting this approach universally has been slow. Alberta, Canada, is in many ways an exemplar of this, with many school districts (including the large urban districts) being slow to embrace inclusion, while others such as PHRD enthusiastically implementing inclusive practice. They see this as having positive implications for all students, consistent with recent research literature. PHRD is a geographically large rural school district of approximately 4000 students in Alberta, Canada. A more detailed treatment of the district context can be found in Loreman et al. (2008a); however PHRD lies to the west of the major city of Edmonton, and covers an area ranging from significant urban centers of Barrhead and Westlock closer to Edmonton, across to Swan Hills in the northwest of Alberta. Primary resourced-based industries such as lumber, natural gas, oil, and agriculture dominate the region's economy; a region which is generally dotted with small towns and the occasional larger rural town. PHRD has a stated commitment to inclusion, which is one of the reasons it was chosen as the jurisdiction to participate in this study. One example of this stated commitment comes from their policy manual, which acknowledges that The unique needs of all students must be the primary focus when providing education. All students shall be given the opportunity to have their program delivered in a regular classroom in their community school with age appropriate peers and shall be given the support required to achieve success (Pembina Hills Regional School Division #7, 2004, p. 8). This commitment to inclusion and subsequent policy is articulated at all levels of the district in conversations with district administration, school administration, and school teaching and support staff. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".