Teachers‟ attitudes towards students with disabilities in Haiti

After conducting a thorough review of the state of inclusion of students with disabilities in Haïti, the authors present a study that investigates the attitudes of urban and rural teachers in Haïti toward inclusion. Participants were administered the Opinions Relative to Integration (ORI) of Students with Disabilities instrument. Reliability of the ORI for Haitian teachers was.68, as determined by the Spearman-Brown reliability coefficient. Teachers ’ attitudes toward integration were not associated with years of teaching experience, education was positively associated with attitudes, and teachers in rural Haïti did not differ from teachers in urban Haïti. Other findings indicated that variables representing teachers ’ cognitions and beliefs were more important in predicting attitudes than variables related to the teachers ’ actual experiences of teaching. Estimates of global populations indicate that more children with disabilities live in developing and third world countries than in industrialized countries (UNESCO, 1996). In 1995, the Ministère de L’Éducation Nationale of Haïti estimated that 11 % of the population had a disability, of which 15 % (120 000) were children of school age; this percentage is about 5% greater than the estimate of the incidence of disabilities in a school age population in the US