Inclusive Education and its Effects on Academic Performance among Students with Disabilities in Mainstreams Secondary Schools in Mfoudi Division.

Abstract

Inclusive education is a process of strengthening the capacity of the education system to reach out to all learners. Therefore, there have been a number of campaigns and laws on the successful implementation of inclusive education and how to solve the problem of children with disabilities in the mainstreams schools. It is expected that disabled children should excel in general education with all the technological advancement concerning their education, all the legislative and educational reforms put in place by the government for their studies. However, despite the drafting of many international, regional and national conventions on persons with disabilities, students with disability still do not perform in school like their peers who are said to be normal. This study was aimed at finding out the various factors that negatively influence the performance of students with disability in Government Secondary Schools. The descriptive research design was used and one hundred and two (102) persons were sampled using the census method. In other to obtain data for the research, two questionnaires were constructed by the researcher for both students and teachers. The student questionnaire was made up of forty one items while that of the teachers was made up of sixteen (16) items with the aim to test the different hypothesis and answer the research questions. The data collected was analyzed with the use of SPSS software version 25.0, wherein both descriptive statistics (charts, frequency distribution tables) and inferential statistics (chi-square) were used. The results showed that the socio-economic status of family negatively influenced students with disability’s performance and teachers did not have training on how to teach inclusive classes so did not find it easy teaching students with disability. However, there were other factors that influenced performance like; infrastructure, self-motivation. The researcher thus proposes from teachers recommendation that teachers in active service should be provided with in-service training to ameliorate their knowledge on teaching students with disabilities and children should be provided with material support to help reduce if not solve the problem.