Determining the Effects of Interactive Book Reading Implementations on the Social Acceptance of Students with Special Needs

Abstract

This study examines the effects of interactive book reading (IBR) implementations on typically developing students’ social acceptance of students with special needs. Since inter-group and within-group comparisons are to be made, a split-plot design of factorial designs was used in the study. In this study, the Social Acceptance Scale (SAS) was administered to four different 4th-grade students in this school to determine the study group. According to the social acceptance scores obtained, 64 students in the two classes closest to each other were determined as the study group. With the random method, one of these classes was assigned as the experimental group and the other as the control group in this study, a form of “Friendship Activity Scale” (FAS) developed by Siperstein (1980) and adapted into Turkish by Civelek with the name “Social Acceptance Scale” (SAS) was used. IBR implementations were conducted in an interactive reading of one book, one lesson hour (40 min) per week for eight weeks. After assessing whether the data were suitable for the use of parametric tests based on normality tests, the data obtained were analyzed using the t-Test for between-group comparisons and the Related Measurements Two-Way Variance Analysis (ANOVA) for within-group comparisons (pretest-posttest) within the context of the questions to be answered in the study. This study mainly found that IBR was effective in raising social acceptance levels among students with special needs and typically developing students.