The Effects of Disabilitiy Understanding Education and Physical Education with Co-Teaching on Disability Awareness and Disability Acceptance Attitude of Non-disabled Middle School Students: Gender and Grade Moderating Effects

Objectives The purposes of this study were to investigate the effect of disabiltiy understanding education and physical education with co-teaching on disability awareness and disabiltiy acceptance attitude of non-disabled middle school students, and the moderating effect of gender and grade. Methods For this purpose, we investigated the changes in disability awareness and attitude toward disability acceptance of 178 non-disabled students at P middle school in W city, G state after implementing 12 hours disability understanding education and physical education with co-teaching. To this end, we conducted a pre-test before the intervention and a post-test after the intervention. Results The effects of disability understanding education and physical education with co-teaching on the diability awareness and disability acceptance attitudes of non-disabled middle school students were as follows. First, regarding disabiltiy awareness and disabiltiy acceptance attitudes, the disability understanding education group and the physical education with co-teaching participation group that showde an increase in the average of the post-test compared th the pre-test, and th figures were statistically significant(p<.001). On the other hand, in th case of the control group, disability awareness decreased in the post-test compared to the pre-test, and disbility accepatance attitudes increased in the post-test compared to the pre-test, but they were not statistically significant(p>.05). Next, as a result of checking the difference in effects between the three groups, there was a statistically difference in disability awareness and disability acceptance attitudes among the thress groups(F=12.560, p<.001). As a result of conducting a post-test analysis to check the specific difference between the disability awareness education group and the control group, and the physical edcuation class participation group that applied co-teaching and the control group(F=19.331, p<.001). As a result of analyzing the moderationg effects of demographic characteristics such as gender and grade, no statistically significant differences were found(p>.05). Conclusions It was found that disabiltiy understanding education and physical education with co-teaching had a positive effect on the disability awareness and attitude toward disability acceptance of non-disabled middle school students, and disability understanding education showed the greatest effect. On the other hand, it was found that gender and grade did not show a statistically significant effect on the disability awareness and attitude toward disability acceptance of non-dsiabled students.