Preschool children: attitudes toward children with disabilities

Abstract

Preschool children’s attitudes toward peers with disabilities are highly important because positive attitudes promote acceptance and inclusion of the child with a disability within the classroom and in society. The purpose of this study is to assess preschool children’s attitudes toward children with disabilities by comparing attitudes toward children in three groups: those with a physical disability, those with intellectually disability, and those without a disability. The Understanding Disability Scale (UDS) was used to ask the preschool children what they meant by the term disabled. In addition, the Behavioral Intentions Scale (BIS) was used to determine the willingness of the preschool children to interact with a child with a disability. The participants for this study consisted of a total of 56 typically developing children, 24 boys and 32 girls, aged 4 to 6 (M = 5.8) from two preschool classes in Macedonia. In this study, the majority of children’s (81.1%) did not believe disability was contagious. Also, 50.9% of children believed a child with a disability was not different from themselves. Results have shown that preschool children’s more prefer to play with children without disabilities (M=26.9). According to the results, we can conclude that preschool children involved in this study did have more positive attitudes toward typically developing peers than toward peers with a disability.