For a long time, inclusion or inclusive education (IE) has been high on the agenda both internationally and in Sweden, not least since the signing of the Salamanca Declaration in 1994 and the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2006. These call for inclusion to be the norm and are guided by the principle that all pupils, regardless of needs, feel that their social, emotional and academic needs are being met. Since the introduction of Lgr11 (2011), the most recent Swedish curriculum, special educational needs (SEN) should be seen as arising out of educational environments and methods that are not adapted enough to be accessible to a wide diversity of pupils. Despite a significant body of research into inclusive education, several researchers raised that few studies focused on the pupil perspective, few were collaborative and few focused on all pupils, that is to say, their focus lies only on pupils with SEN. Arguably, selecting certain groups to investigate goes against the ethos of inclusion and risks missing information from pupils experiencing difficulties that are not yet identified. When considering factors impacting feelings of inclusion, many studies have raised the importance of socio-emotional functioning alongside academic self-concept. This collaborative study looks at how included pupils in a free school in Stockholm feel, with a focus on whether there is a difference between the pupils’ perception of inclusion depending on whether they have self-reported SEN or not, what grade they are in and their gender. This is measured using a new instrument, the ‘Perception of Inclusion Questionnaire (PIQ) - student version’, which is also being validated as a tool for measuring inclusion in Sweden. Results indicate clearly that pupils with SEN feel significantly less included than their typically-developing peers across all three scales, emotional inclusion, social inclusion and academic self-concept. In addition, grade has an impact, with pupils in Grade 8 having lower feelings of emotional inclusion, social inclusion and academic self-concept than in Grade 5. This difference was apparent for all pupils but the effect was greater in pupils with SEN. Gender returned insignificant results on all three scales. Another interesting result is that more pupils self-report actual or suspected SEN than the school reports, indicating that there are a number of pupils with difficulties who would be overlooked in studies that do not include all pupils. The Swedish version of the PIQ for Students has been validated.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-159820 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Trygger, Maria |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för beteendevetenskap och lärande, Linköpings universitet, Utbildningsvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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