Direct Intervention to Modify Attitudes toward the Handicapped by Community Volunteers: The Learning about Handicaps Programme.

Attitudes of nonhandicapped peers are crucial to the successful integration (mainstreaming) of handicapped students into regular or main school classrooms. Research has consistently shown that nonhandicapped students are not widely accepting of their handicapped classmates. Several intervention programmes aimed at the modification of negative attitudes are reported in the literature, most of which were carried out by professionals. This paper describes a unique programme, planned and implemented by community volunteers which purpose was to facilitate the development of positive attitudes toward the disabled. The programme was implemented over one semester in five public schools. Five classrooms were assigned to the experimental condition and six to the control condition. Findings indicated that the training was effective in significantly improving the attitudes of the experimental group subjects as compared to the control group subjects. The paper discusses variables which contributed to the success of th...

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