AWARENESS ABOUT LEARNING DISABILITIES AMONG ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS

The present research was conducted to examine the level of awareness among Elementary school Teachers of District Ferozepur about Learning Disabilities. Another objective of the study was to investigate the differences in awareness between Gender and Teachers of Privates and Public sector. The sample comprised of 200 randomly selected elementary school teachers from district Ferozepur of Punjab state. The survey was conducted on self prepared questionnaire by investigator. Item wise descriptive analysis was applied to study the level of awareness and t-test was applied to check the significant differences between the groups. The findings of the study revealed that Elementary School Teachers of District Ferozepur have very low level of awareness about Learning Disabilities. In majority (90%) of elementary Teachers were unable to write single type of Learning Disability which reveals that the sample has very poor awareness about the types of Learning Disabilities. Approximately, one fourth of the samples of Elementary school teachers of District Ferozepur has not the ability to identify the students with Learning Disabilities. Furthermore, almost half sample of teachers was not aware about that Learning Disabled students can be in normal schools and not aware about the characteristics of Learning Disabled Students. It was also revealed from data, the teachers were not aware about actual problems that are faced by Learning Disabled students. While studying the efforts to tackle students with Learning Disability made by teachers, it was noticed that twenty percent of Elementary school teachers of District Ferozepur were not adopting any type of strategy to solve the problems of Learning Disabled students. Whereas, 40% of teachers were not aware about the actual problems that were faced by Learning Disabled Students. Additionally, it was evident from results that above half of the Participants were not aware about the reason behind Learning Disability. They misconceive it with sensory disabilities and were not aware about Dyslexia which is a major type of Learning Disability. To conclude, majority of the Elementary School Teachers of district Ferozepur were not aware about the Dyscalculia, Dysgraphia and Dyslexia.