Abstract
It is unclear to what extent teachers can accurately assess the social inclusion of their students with and without SEN. The study aims to shed light on these desiderata. Students (N = 1.644) with SEN (learning, behavior, and language problems) and without SEN and their teachers (N = 79) participated in the study. Sociometric peer nominations, students' self-perceived social inclusion, and teachers' assessments regarding students' social inclusion and self-perceived social inclusion were administered. The results suggest that teachers are moderately accurate in identifying social acceptance and social rejection, while accuracy is low when assessing students' self-perceived social inclusion. That said, rating accuracy varied strongly between teachers, ranging from no agreement to a perfect concordance. Teachers seem to be more accurate in estimating the social acceptance of students with learning problems. The results emphasize the importance of differentiating between various social inclusion criteria (i.e., students' self-report vs. peer nominations) and accounting for inter-individual differences in teachers' rating accuracy.
Highlights
Being part of a social community is a basic psychological need (Deci and Ryan, 1985)
Our results reveal a very high degree of variability in teachers’ assessment accuracy, similar to studies on teachers’ rating accuracy in other areas (Dicke et al, 2012; Gabriele et al, 2016; Praetorius et al, 2017)
Our results indicate that teachers’ rating accuracy varies depending on students’ special educational needs (SEN)
Summary
Being part of a social community is a basic psychological need (Deci and Ryan, 1985). Numerous studies have shown that children with special educational needs (SEN) in inclusive classes are at higher risk of being excluded (Lindsay, 2007; Ruijs and Peetsma, 2009; Avramidis, 2012; Krull et al, 2014, 2018) and have fewer friendships compared to peers without SEN (Henke et al, 2017; Hoffmann et al, 2020) This puts students with SEN in jeopardy of a negative cognitive, emotional, and social development and poses a threat to the goals of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which claims that all people with disabilities should receive the support required to facilitate their effective education within an inclusive school setting (article 24, 3, The United Nations, 2006). Research indicates that in classes where teachers provide a high level of emotional support (Gest and Rodkin, 2011; Hendrickx et al, 2016) and actively shape peer interactions (Gest and Rodkin, 2011), student friendships develop more frequently and positively
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