PRESERVICE PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS' SENTIMENTS, ATTITUDES AND CONCERNS ABOUT INCLUSIVE EDUCATION: DIFFERENTIATED SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS

Recently, students with special needs draw attention by the regulations and amendments made by the Turkey Ministry of National Education regarding the inclusive education, as well as by the new courses added to all branches in the new teacher training programs started by the Turkish Council of Higher Education in 2018. These changes and innovations provide the possibility that the use of differentiated activities in science courses as an example of instructional adaptations in science teacher training will make a contribution to inclusive education. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of differentiated science activities on pre-service primary teachers’ sentiments, attitudes and concerns about inclusive education. The randomized pretest-posttest control group design was used in the research. The study group of the research consisted of 103 second grade pre-service primary teachers who attended the Science Laboratory Applications course. The Sentiments, Attitudes and Concerns Scale about Inclusive Education was used as a data collection tool. A paired-sample t-test was used for data analysis. As a result of the study, it is concluded that differentiated science experiments positively affected pre-service primary teachers’ sentiments, attitudes and concerns about inclusive education.