Special Education, under Handicapped Personnel

redefinition of the roles and responsibilities of both regular and special education personnel. Specifically, educators must prepare to work with handicapped students who are being edu-cated in regular schools and classrooms with their nonhandicapped peers. Commonly re-ferred to as mainstreaming, this practice re-quires that all educators, including teachers, counselors, school psychologists, and adminis-trators, develop competencies which may not have been included in their preservice training programs. In addition, the federal government mandates each state to submit annually a Com-prehensive System of Personnel Development (CSPD) outlining the inservice training which regular and special education personnel are to undergo to insure that the requirements of Public Law 94-142 are met. A number of research studies that have been conducted on inservice programs conclude that educators ’ skills in working with the handi-capped improve substantially as a result of such training (Horne, 1979; Mandell & Strain, 1978); however, the ability of these programs to change participants ’ receptiveness to the prac-tice of mainstreaming is dubious (Alexander & Strain, 1978; Edgar, 1972; Johnson, 1980). Hent-schel (1977) has postulated that inservice pro-grams often fail to change attitudes toward mainstreaming because the participants have not fully articulated, for example, their need for information designed to allay their fears and misconceptions concerning the handicapped. Clearly, to insure effective inservice pro-grams, inservice planners (e.g., local school districts) and inservice providers (e.g., univer-sities) must assess the needs of participant