Abstract
Prior studies have shown that students with disabilities have a difficult time with social interaction with their peers when inclusive education has been applied in a classroom. Social participation plays a large role in the emotional development of students. Interaction is often necessary to function in the educational environment. The experiment presented in this paper conducted by Koster et al. (2009) was designed to test the hypothesis that the Social Participation Questionnaire (SPQ) is able to distinguish between students with and without disabilities. The questionnaire, developed in 2008 by Koster et al. (as cited in Koster et al., 2009), was designed “for teachers to assess the social participation of pupils with special needs in regular primary education” (Koster, 2009, p. 213).
Keywords: social participation, inclusive education,
Testing the Discriminating Power of a Social Participation Questionnaire
Research has shown that students with special needs have difficulty creating peer-to-peer relationships in classrooms where inclusion is applied. The Social Participation Questionnaire (SPQ) was designed to determine the social interaction of students with special needs that have been placed in regular classes.
The SPQ has four key themes: “friendships/relationships,” “contacts/interactions,” “pupil’s social self-perception” and “acceptance by classmates” (Koster et al., 2009). The experiment conducted by Koster et al. was designed to “test the discriminating power of the SPQ” (2009, p. 214). They hypothesized that the SPQ’s subscales were valid representations of social interaction and that it “can discriminate between students with and without special needs” (Koster et al., 2009, p. 214).
The researchers used two subsamples to collect data. In each subsample, 300 primary schools had at least one student, aged between six and nine, with special needs in grades one to three (Koster et al., 2009). In the first subsample, 53 schools responded and accepted the invitation to participate. To ensure that these schools represented the population accurately, a survey was taken by phone of 41 nonparticipating schools and 19 participating schools to assess the schools’ views toward inclusion (Koster et al., 2009). Based on their answers to the survey questions, Koster et al. determined that “the cooperating schools did not overrepresent schools with the most positive view or most positive experiences with inclusive education” (Koster et al., 2009, p. 215).
After the researchers examined the possibility of the presence of bias, 96 students with special needs were taken from 75 classes from 53 schools in subsample one and 141 students with special needs were taken from 105 classes from 66 schools in subsample two (Koster et al., 2009).
Each teacher was asked to fill out the SPQ for each student with special needs and for two students without special needs (Koster et al., 2009). In seven classes, the teacher failed to fill out the SPQ for more than one typical student and the SPQs for ten students were not filled in completely. This leaves 580 students in the sample, 234 of which had special needs and 346 did not (Koster et al., 2009).
The SPQ was created to target the four key themes. A list of statements was compiled then examined by a panel of fourteen people with knowledge of inclusion (Koster et al., 2009). The list was narrowed down to 74 statements before being narrowed again to 30 by another panel of 190 people with knowledge of inclusion (Koster et al., 2009). Five statements were added and one was removed to create a wider range of statements in more than one theme. Thus, the final SPQ consisted of 34 statements; 6-14 statements represented a single theme (Koster et al., 2009). The teachers’ responses to each statement would be based on a 5-point scale.
The responses to the items were used to further decrease the number of statements so that the SPQ is able to discriminate against special needs students. In total, ten statements were removed because of weak scalability or violation of the nonintersection assumption, in which one statement cannot overlap with another statement in terms of content (Koster et al., 2009). The final 24 statements in the SPQ were used to test the questionnaire’s discriminatory power.
Going in accordance with the hypothesis, the students with special needs got a lower score compared to the average students, suggesting that social participation is lower for special needs students (Koster et al., 2009). Additionally, Koster et al. found that there were variances among the categories of disabilities (2009). Students with behavioral disorders and autistic spectrum disorders received lower scores on the SPQ than students with intellectual disabilities, while students with speech or language disabilities and students with motor disabilities had the highest scores (Koster et al., 2009). This pattern was visible in both the total SPQ scores and the scores of the key themes. The low scores of the students with autistic spectrum disorder indicate that these students have “difficulty building relationships with typical peers and are at risk of becoming isolated in the classroom” (Koster et al., 2009, p. 220).
More studies should be done on the SPQ to determine its discriminating ability between different categories of disabilities. They should include a large sample of students in different categories to gain a better understanding of the differences in social behavior. This experiment is not a legitimate representation of this because the number of students in each category was not sufficient to make a reliable assumption about the differences of social patterns in these students (Koster et al., 2009).
To conclude, the SPQ revealed a difference in the social patterns of students with special needs in comparison to those without special needs. This information is important so that teachers may determine when a student, who has been placed in regular education, needs special attention to develop the social interaction skills needed throughout life. To determine if the SPQ can be used to classify the type of disability the student has more research must be done to include a larger sample of students with varying disabilities. References
Koster, M., Timmerman, M., Nakken H., Pijl S., & Van Houten, E. (2009). Evaluating Social Participation of Pupils with Special Needs in Regular Primary Schools: Examination of a Teacher Questionnaire. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 25(4), 213-222.