A Disability Awareness Unit in Physical Education and Attitudes of Elementary School Students

With informed consent 430 students in Grades 2 through 6 from two elementary schools in a large, suburban-rural school district were pretested and post-tested on the Children's Attitudes Toward Handicapped Scale. Students, by grade, rotated among four to seven different locations within the school's gymnasium, each identified by a different disability. There was no control group. Repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to assess the effect of sex on pre- and postexperimental exposures on the attitudinal scores. A 2 x 5 (school x grade) analysis of variance assessed the main effects of school and grade on attitudinal scores. Significant effects were sex but not school or grade.