Attitude of Primary School Teachers towards Learning Disabilities in Children - An Intervention Study

The attitude of a teacher can be detrimental in shaping the lives of their students. If a teacher invests slightly lesser interest or is partial towards some children, it will certainly have a negative impact on the child. The same might happen in the lives of a child with learning disabilities (LD), but this has a larger impact on a child with LD than it may have on his/her peer. A child with LD can have specific problems in reading, writing, spelling and/or arithmetic and may also display severe discrepancy in intellectual capabilities and academic achievement. When they are not given appropriate help and/or opportunities, they may lose interest and concentration in academics. Hence, it is vital for a teacher to identify as well as develop a favorable attitude towards learning disabled children. The present study was designed to study the impact of an intervention program on the attitude of primary school teachers belonging to the experimental group and to assess and compare their attitude towards children with LD. The sample consisted of 64 primary school teachers from 5governmentand 5 private schools of Urban Bengaluru District who were a part of experimental group. These respondents attended a three-month intervention program which was designed to enhance the attitudes of the group towards children with LD. The tool used for the pre-test to assess their attitude was reused to study the impact of the intervention program of the experimental group leaving a gap of 2 months after the intervention ended. The collected data from the respondents was tabulated and statistically analyzed using percentage, mean, standard deviation, chi-square and the paired 't' test. The results revealed that majority of respondents belonged to the age group of 41-50 years, were married and had 2 children. The mean score percentage was found to be higher during the post-test as compared to the pre-test score among both government and private school respondents. With respect to the attitude levels, majority of both the government and private school respondents showed moderate level of attitude in the pre-test whereas in the post-test, they had a favorable attitude towards learning-disabled children and none of them were left in the unfavorable level of attitude category after being exposed to an intervention program.