Self-concept of Students with Learning Disabilities in Self-contained Environments PDF Download

Author: Lori Anne Gillan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781109900613
Category : Learning disabled children
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Although placement in less restrictive educational settings is generally believed to be associated with more positive social outcomes for students with learning disabilities, the empirical research has yielded equivocal findings. This study investigated the relationship between self-concept and social support for students with learning disabilities taught in self-contained special education classrooms. Fifty-seven fourth-through sixth-grade students were administered Harter's People In My Life scale, which measures students' perceived social support from parents, teachers, classmates, and friends. Students were also administered two scales developed by Harter and Renick which measure students' domain-specific judgments of their competence and their judgments of the importance of each domain, as well as their perceived global worth. Results revealed that social support from classmates was most predictive of academic self-concept, whereas social support from family was the better predictor of global self-concept. Students with learning disabilities differentiated in terms of their perceived global and academic self-concepts, producing four groups (high academic/high global self-concept, high academic/low global self-concept, low academic/low global self-concept, and low academic/high global self-concept). While results indicated that those with low academic self-concepts tended to have more negative discrepancy scores (difference between students' ratings of the importance of academic and non-academic domains of self-concept) than those in the high academic self-concept group, there was no evidence that students with high global self-concept and low academic self-concept had different discrepancy scores than students in the other groups, therefore nullifying the hypothesis that students with learning disabilities discount the importance of academic domains. The implications of these data with regard to theory and research, as well as educational practice, are discussed.