The impact of inclusion on the performance of students with and without special educational needs

Abstract

With the increasing call for inclusive schooling in Lebanon, inclusion stimulates research into educational outcomes of students with and without special needs to draw conclusions on the desirability of this choice based on empirical evidence. This study compared the impact of inclusion in a Lebanese school on the performance of students with and without special needs. The group of students with special needs included a group of identified gifted students and a group of students with mild to moderate identified learning disabilities. This comparison included investigating what are the perceptions of the students with and without special needs of their performance in an inclusive school, which population of the three populations at the school is best served by inclusion from students’ perceptions, what are the inclusive practices that affected students’ performance and which indicators contributed most positively to foster students’ performance as perceived by them. The design used in this study is a mixed design where participants (students of 18 inclusive sections from grade 7 to grade 12) answered a questionnaire on student performance to compare the impact of inclusive education on their performance, and six focus groups(threein middle school and three in high school: one group of gifted, one group of regular and one group of students with learning disabilities at each level) were conducted to describe the practices that affected their performance,helping to identify the differences in perceptions among the three populations.Both the questionnaire and the focus groups wereconducted usingIndicators for Inclusion issued by Education Bureau, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government (2008). All gifted, regular and students with learning disabilities perceived inclusion as positively impacting their performance. A significant difference in impact of inclusion was noted between the gifted population and the other populations: perceived impact of inclusion was higher for gifted students.